STANGORD JAMES RYDER RANDAEL. [1839-1908] MATTHEW PAGE ANDREWS THE HE world-wide fame of "Maryland, My Maryland" tended: the lifetime of the author to create the impression that he must be classed with the writers of a single song. This belief became so early and so firmly fixed in the public mind that, by the author's own confession, it served to discourage his too sensitive spirit from giving forth to the world the further products of his poetic genius. Rarely were his poems written to fit any special occasion; they were rather the result of the inspiration of the moment and the reflection of his spirit at the time of their creation. Of an author whose earliest work had won so wide a fame, it is a unique tribute to say that he did not write one line of his poetry for material compensation. His verses were habitually given away to friends who might ask for them; they might then be printed in some purely local publication or kept indefinitely in manuscript form. He did not live to see his poems collected for publication; and it was not known until after his death that the author of the most spirited appeal to arms and to love of country in the English tongue was also master of a wide range in metrical composition, throughout which he shows varied charm in thought and rhythm. In fact, the very excellence of his most popular song so obscured the unassuming singer that, in collections of Civil War verse published as late as the Twentieth Century, its authorship was attributed to another; while some of his poems, in the same or in similar collections, were published anonymously. This instance of injustice done to a reputable author cannot be paralleled in modern literature. The editors presumably had no intention to defraud; but the erroneously credited author of "Maryland, My Maryland" is the man whom Randall once exposed as a false claimant to a song of the war composed by a Northern woman. Subjectively and objectively, Randall himself is to blame for any failure to secure during his lifetime eminently merited recognition as a poet capable of the highest achievement. Owing to his temperamental modesty, he shrank from general recognition and deprecated praise, where another would have perceived opportunities of securing proper remuneration for the fruits of his genius that he so improvidently gave away. He was almost devoid of business acumen and of, the self-advertising sense in a self-advertising age. From the fearful era of "Reconstruction" to the time of his last longings for his native Maryland, he was called upon to support a growing family in an impoverished land. He might have turned his name and ability to good account in the great publishing center of the Nation; but, like Lee at Washington College, and Maury at the Virginia Military Institute-who for war-stricken Lexington. refused, the one opulence and honor in New York, the other distinctions and competence in Paris-Randall was unwilling to leave te cherished land of his earliest song. Although by nature a dreamer, his dreams were cut short in the drudgery of clerical labor or mechanical journalism; yet his newspaper work was often illuminated by such clearness, force, and beauty as to be widely quoted before lost in journalistic oblivion. Throughout his life the poet was repeatedly and earnestly urged to gather in some accessible form his "spirit offspring" that it might receive general appreciation; but, while diligent and conscientious in his work for others, he would not take the pains to collect his own poems for publication. The poems of James Ryder Randall may be thus classified: War poems of the Southern Confederacy; poems of patriotism and love of country; poems of love and sentiment; poems of religious thought and expression; miscellaneous poems of humor, and juvenilia. In his war poems of the Southern Confederacy, Randall is always emotional and often passionate. When his collected poems first appeared, several of the greater critics, of other sympathies, deemed him "narrow" or "spiteful"; but calmer views have, in the main, prevailed. Years before this, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to Charles Strahan (January 26, 1886): "I always felt rather than thought that there was a genuine ring and life-like spirit in that lyric, 'Maryland, My Maryland,'" closing his letter with the statement that he regretted that he could not have written a song devoted to his own State that "would be as musical and as effective on what was for me the right side in the armed controversy." Holmes showed no evidence of injured feelings in his generous praise of the Southern song; and it has been prominently published by J. C. Derby that Randall once "admitted that his 'scum' rhymed with the anticipated 'come."" On the other hand, Randall made poetical allowance for Holmes's "rag of treason" carried into battle by Southern "sons of Belial.” Randall early felt a passionate love of the heroic. Among the first lines he ever penned were those inspired by a lecture on Greece, which he heard when but a youth of sixteen. So averse in his later life was the poet to self-discussion that it will never be known how much of the art in poetry young Randall had then learned or in stinctively grasped. The innate talent, or "the art that plays its part," showed itself in his boyhood in "Marathon." Byron would not have been ashamed of some of these early lines; and very like the skill of Tennyson in bold Sir Bedivere's descent from the clanging cliffs and sharp-smitten crags to the level lake and the long glories. of the winter moon is the youthful Randall's onomatopoetic art in the poem from which the following lines are taken: "The dark Platean in the tide of war, About a year before his death, Randall wrote: "The influence of good women, young and old, has always been very profound in forming my character and bringing forth the poetic faculty or inspiration." Then follows a beautiful tribute to his mother as the first and best of them all. Frequently, in his poems of love and sentiment, his devotion to the inspiring subject of his passion was idealized and identified with the most exalted religious contemplation. Especially is this seen in the poems "Eidoion” and “Anima.” In his poems of a religious nature, Randall strikes all the keys of human faith from earth to heaven. While in Poe's "Israfel" we have a song of immortality that is gifted with supernal beauty attuned to heavenly contemplation, except through the person of the singer, it is almost apart from the thought of fellow mortals in their earthly pilgrimage. With something less of lyric beauty, but more of love of man, Randall's fugitive and uncollected verses carried into the home thoughts that made the mother clip them for her scrap-book from whatever source they chanced to come. Children and their elders heard them in hundreds of Southern homes, but rarely knew who wrote them; for in the numerous copies found thus preserved a simple "R."-sometimes not even that was the only indication of their authorship. James Ryder Randall was born in Baltimore, January 1, 1839. He was a direct descendant of the René Leblanc immortalized in "Evangeline." René's daughter Marguerite married, in Maryland, Cyprian Dupuis, a fellow-Acadian exile, and their daughter married William Hooper, who was descended from the Massachusetts family represented in the signing of the Declaration of Independence-an unusual union of Catholic Acadian and New England Puritan. This William Hooper and his wife were the grandparents of the poet, who was also descended on the paternal side from the family of Lord Archbishop Killen of Dublin, and Christopher Randall, founder of Randallstown, Maryland, again a union of Catholic and Protestant in an age observing strict religious affiliations.* The early training of James Ryder Randall was entrusted to Professor Joseph H. Clarke, in Baltimore, who had previously taught the youthful Edgar Allan Poe in Richmond. From Baltimore young Randall went to Georgetown College, and as a student there attracted considerable attention by some remarkably mature lines which were published in the Evening Star of Washington, District of Columbia. From Georgetown College, Randall traveled through Florida, the West Indies, and South America. Thence he went to New Orleans, and shortly afterward was persuaded to take the chair of English in the once flourishing Poydras College at Pointe Coupée, Louisiana. Here, after reading the news of the clash between citizens of Baltimore and Massachusetts troops on their way to invade Virginia, "Maryland's sister State," he was inspired to write his most famous battle-hymn; while adding a personal touch to the intensity of his feelings was the fact that the first citizen to fall in the fight was an intimate friend and college mate. "My Maryland" was written in an inspired hour of the sleepless night that followed, and the spirited verses of the youth of twenty-two became not only the war-song of the Confederacy, but were destined to outlive the cause evoking them and become the world-known march of a reunited nation. The author sprang into fame as the hero of the hour in the South, and abroad he was welcomed into the world of poets. He received a letter from a member of the family of Lord Byron, urging him to visit London and begging for a manuscript copy of the poem. A beautiful Russian girl of high rank deemed it an honor to have met a friend of the poet, and after singing the hymn she gave him this message: "When you see your friend who wrote that, tell him you heard it sung by a Russian girl who lives in Archangel, north of Siberia, and learned to sing it there." Distances were great and the mails uncertain in the South at that time, and although Randall's verses traveled rapidly, his name did not at once go northward with them. "Maryland, My Maryland" was published anonymously in Baltimore and a copy was read to the poet's mother, who, dwelling in her heart upon her son's achieve *Genealogy given by Mrs. Hester Dorsey Richardson of Baltimore. ments in verse, said immediately of the lines: "Oh! that they had been my boy's!" In Baltimore, they were soon set to music by Mr. H. C. Wagner to the tune of "Ma Normandie"; then by the Misses Cary to "Lauriger Horatius," which air was changed to its original "Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum" by Charles Ellerbrock, a young German music teacher. The music of "Lauriger Horatius" and the words of "My Maryland" were taken to the publisher by Miss Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson (a grand-niece of Francis Scott Key), who, because her father was "a Union man," dared to do it when others feared confinement in Fort McHenry or in Federal prisons. Miss Nicholson was a granddaughter of Judge Joseph Hopper Nicholson, who first published "The Star-Spangled Banner" and who was a brother-in-law of its author. The original manuscript of Key's poem was owned by Miss Nicholson's father at the time she procured the publication in musical form of Maryland's second notable contribution to the world's famous battle-hymns. Not long after writing "Maryland, My Maryland"-which was almost immediately followed by another war-poem, "There's Life in the Old Land Yet"-Randall arrived in New Orleans. As the war had begun, he applied for enlistment in the Confederate service; but, after medical examination, the role of a Tyrtæus was all that was permitted him; he had eleven hemorrhages of the lungs, was found to be unable to endure the hardships of campaigning, and was mustered out. He was a romantic youth and was possibly over-idolized by the fair sex.* When he was not writing battle-hymns he was inditing softer strains, now to "Ma Belle Créole," now to a "Damsel of Mobile" or other gentle fancies of the passing hour. It is just possible that "Margherita," one of the most remarkable musical fantasies in English poetry, was his only sentimental ballad that was wholly the result of fancy without a mortal form as the exciting cause. One of his love-lyrics, however, which the reader is left to discover among the others in his volume of poems, subtly strikes a note of finality. In a railway coach, near the close of the war, he borrowed a newspaper from a young lady. It is not recorded whether he really wanted the paper or that he ever read it; but it is on record that the young lady, the daughter of General Marcus C. M. Hammond of South Carolina and a stranger to him then, subsequently became his wife; while the newspaper was the Augusta Chronicle, with *Forty-seven years later, Randall's aged but practical friend, Senator William Pinkney Whyte, expressed to the writer of the foregoing, when Randall last visited Baltimore, his impatience at the poet's "persistence in accepting thank-you invitations to lecture to women's clubs when he could have put his talks on a financial basis for his material support." |