Eckbert looked at his sick and agitated wife with deep emotion; he stood silent and thoughtful; then spoke some words of comfort to her, and went out. In a distant chamber he walked to and fro in indescribable disquiet. Walther for many years had been his sole companion; and now this person was the only mortal in the world whose existence pained and oppressed him. It seemed as if he should be gay and light of heart, were that one thing but removed. He took his bow, to dispel these thoughts; and went to hunt. It was a rough, stormy, winter day; the snow was lying deep on the hills, and bending down the branches of the trees. He roved about; the sweat was standing on his brow; he found no game, and this embittered his ill-humor. All at once he saw an object moving in the distance: it was Walther gathering moss from the trunks of trees. Scarce knowing what he did, he bent his bow: Walther looked round, and gave a threatening gesture; but the arrow was already flying, and he sank transfixed by it. For a great while after this occurrence, Eckbert lived in the deepest solitude; he had all along been melancholy, for the strange history of his wife disturbed him, and he dreaded some unlucky incident or other; but at present he was utterly at variance with himself. The murder of his friend arose incessantly before his mind; he lived in the anguish of continual remorse. A young knight, named Hugo, made advances to the silent, melancholy Eckbert, and appeared to have a true affection for him. Eckbert felt himself exceedingly surprised; he met the knight's friendship with the greater readiness, the less he had anticipated it. The two were now frequently together; Hugo showed his friend all possible attentions: one scarcely ever went to ride without the other; in all companies they got together. In a word, they seemed inseparable. Eckbert was never happy longer than a few transitory moments: for he felt too clearly that Hugo loved him only by mistake; that he knew him not, was unacquainted with his history; and he was seized again with the same old longing to unbosom himself wholly, that he might be sure whether Hugo was his friend or not. But again his apprehensions, and the fear of being hated and abhorred, withheld him. There were many hours in which he felt so much impressed with his entire worthlessness, that he believed no mortal, not a stranger to his history, could entertain regard for him. Yet still he was unable to withstand himself: on a solitary ride he disclosed his whole history to Hugo, and asked if he could love a murderer. Hugo seemed touched, and tried to comfort him. Eckbert returned to town with a lighter heart. But it seemed to be his doom that in the very hour of confidence he should always find materials for suspicion. Scarcely had they entered the public hall, when, in the glitter of the many lights, Hugo's looks had ceased to satisfy him. He thought he noticed a malicious smile: he remarked that Hugo did not speak to him as usual; that he talked with the rest, and seemed to pay no heed to him. In the party was an old knight, who had always shown himself the enemy of Eckbert, had often asked about his riches and his wife in a peculiar style. With this man Hugo was conversing; they were speaking privately, and casting looks at Eckbert. The suspicions of the latter seemed confirmed; he thought himself betrayed, and a tremendous rage took hold of him. As he continued gazing, on a sudden he discerned the countenance of Walther, - all his features, all the form so well known to him; he gazed, and looked, and felt convinced that it was none but Walther who was talking to the knight. His horror cannot be described; in a state of frenzy he rushed out of the hall, left the town over-night, and after many wanderings returned to his castle. He resolved to take a journey, that he might reduce his thoughts to order; the hope of friendship, the desire of social intercourse, he had now forever given up. He set out without prescribing to himself any certain route; indeed he took small heed of the country he passed through. Having hastened on for some days at the quickest pace of his horse, on a sudden he found himself entangled in a labyrinth of rocks, from which he could discover no outlet. At length he met an old peasant, who guided him by a path leading past a waterfall; he offered him some coins for his guidance, but the peasant would not take them. "What use is it?" said Eckbert. "I could believe that this man too was none but Walther. He looked round once more, and it was none but Walther. Eckbert spurred his horse as fast as it could gallop over meads and forests, till it sank exhausted to the earth. Regardless of this, he hastened forward on foot. In a dreamy mood he mounted a hill: he fancied he caught the sound of a lively barking at a little distance; the birch-trees whispered in the intervals, and in the strangest notes he heard this song: "Alone in the wood so gay, Once more I stay; None dare me slay, The evil far away: Ah, here I stay, Alone in wood so gay.” The mar The sense, the consciousness, of Eckbert had departed; it was a riddle which he could not solve, whether he was dreaming now, or had before dreamed of a wife and friend. velous was mingled with the common; the world around him seemed enchanted, and he himself was incapable of thought or recollection. A crooked, bent old woman crawled coughing up the hill with a crutch. "Art thou bringing me my bird, my pearls, my dog?" cried she to him. "See how injustice punishes itself! No one but I was Walther, was Hugo." "God of heaven!" said Eckbert, muttering to himself: "in what frightful solitude have I passed my life?" "And Bertha was thy sister." Eckbert sank to the ground. She was "Why did she leave me deceitfully? All would have been fair and well: her time of trial was already finished. the daughter of a knight, who had her nursed in a shepherd's house; the daughter of thy father." "Why have I always had a forecast of this dreadful thought?" cried Eckbert. "Because in early youth thy father told thee: he could not keep this daughter by him on account of his second wife, her stepmother." Eckbert lay distracted and dying on the ground. Faint and bewildered, he heard the old woman speaking, the dog barking, and the bird repeating its song. HENRY TIMROD (1829-1867) ENRY TIMROD was one of the pioneer American poets of the South. Singing in an untoward day, hounded by misfortune, dying young, he yet breathed into his song the fervid beauty of his land. His personal record makes a brief, pathetic story. He was the son of William Henry Timrod, who was of German extraction and a man of remarkable mental power, himself something of a poet. Henry was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on December 8th, 1829, and got his schooling in that city. He then entered the University of Georgia, but owing to his slender purse was unable to finish his course; however, he read avidly and grounded himself in good literature while in college. In those days he was always inditing love verses to pretty girls, real or imagined. Next, the dreamy, imaginative fellow tried to study law, only to find it uncongenial,- the common lot of those called to literature. So he supported himself until the war-time by private tutoring in the family of a Carolina planter. When the Rebellion broke out, he became war correspondent of the Charleston Mercury; but the horrors of war acting on his sensitive nature made the task distasteful. His appointment as assistant editor on the Columbia South-Carolinian in 1864 gave a promise of more congenial work and brighter fortune. He had married the woman of his choice, he was able to set up a modest home, and children were born to him. But the respite of home and happiness was all too short. He lost a darling child. Sherman's March to the Sea, with its devastation of the city, ruined his business and left him a broken man. He lived thereafter from hand to mouth, often in literal want of bread, getting temporary government employment to tide over a crisis, and steadily lapsing into illhealth. Finally, after the forewarning of several severe hemorrhages, he died on the anniversary of the death of Poe, October 7th, 1867, under forty years of age,-a melancholy life-struggle and seeming life-failure. The biographies of Southern poets like Timrod and Lanier make grim reading. Timrod received so little encouragement in his literary work as to sadden and embitter him. A small volume of his verse was published in 1860, but with scanty recognition. Here and there a critic saw merit in it, but it never came into general popularity. The XXV-936 Northern magazines would not take his contributions: he was out of the current of literary activity. He was regarded with some local pride, and at one time a movement was set on foot to publish and present him with a handsome illustrated edition of his poems for circulation in England; but to his great disappointment the project fell through,- not unnaturally, since the national situation drew men's minds from thoughts of literature. The definite edition of the poems is posthumous,- that issued in 1873, with a memoir by his dear friend and fellow-poet, Paul Hamilton Hayne. A perusal of this book reveals the fine quality of Timrod's work. Done under every disadvantage, incomplete and inadequate as it seems in comparison with what, under favoring conditions, he might have achieved, it is nevertheless very true, sweet, and heartfelt singing. Timrod had a deep, reverent love of nature, and was a disciple of Wordsworth without imitating that high priest of nature-worship. Spring,' perhaps his finest short lyric, reflects this influence and predilection. He was also a broad-minded patriot, who, while in a chant like his 'Carolina' he could voice sectional feeling, could in that noble piece 'The Cotton Boll,' and in other lyrics, look prophetically into the future, and hail the dawn of a beneficent peace, a wonderful national prosperity. Timrod's style has nothing of the erratic about it: his diction is simple, chaste, felicitous; his images and similes unforced and pleasing. If he is to be called a poet of promise rather than performance, it is only in view of the poor opportunity he had, and in the conviction that had fortune been more kindly, he would have richly repaid her in what he gave the world. SPRING PRING, with that nameless pathos in the air SPRIN Which dwells with all things fair, Spring, with her golden suns and silver rain, Is with us once again. Out in the lonely woods the jasmine burns Into a royal court with green festoons In the deep heart of every forest tree And there's a look about the leafless bowers As if they dreamed of flowers. |