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And through the cold, untempered ocean pours
Its genial streams, that far off Arctic shores
May sometimes catch upon the softened breeze
Strange tropic warmth and hints of summer seas.
With the outbreak of hostilities in April,
Timrod wrote his passionate lyric
A Cry to Arms, and later,
Carolina.
But none of
Timrod's poems had the lyric quality that fits them for popular music.
The union of music and poetry in a splendid impassioned utterance came from
James Ryder Randall (1839-1909). Seldom in history have the man, the moment, and the word met in such happy conjunction as in the composition of
My Maryland.
Randall, a native of
Baltimore—just from college in
Maryland, and, as he said, full of poetry and romance —was teaching English literature in Poydras College at
Pointe Coupee, Louisiana, when he read in the New Orleans
Delta an account of the attack on the
Massachusetts troops as they passed through
Baltimore:
This account [he said in later years] excited me greatly; I had long been absent from my native city, and the startling event there inflamed my mind.
That night I could not sleep, for my nerves were all unstrung, and I could not dismiss what I had read in the paper from my mind.
About midnight I arose, lit a candle, and went to my desk.
Some powerful spirit appeared to possess me, and almost involuntarily I proceeded to write the song of My Maryland.
I remember that the idea appeared to first take shape as music in the brain—some wild air that I cannot now recall.
The whole poem was dashed off rapidly when once begun.
It was not composed in cold blood, but under what may be called a conflagration of the senses, if not an inspiration of the intellect.
He read the poem the next morning to his students, and at their suggestion sent it to the New Orleans
Delta, from which it was copied in nearly every Southern journal.
The finding of an appropriate melody for the words was the achievement of the Cary sisters of
Baltimore.
A glee club, which was in the habit of singing at their home, sang the words to the tune
Lauriger Horatius, well known as a college tune that had come from a modification of the German
Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum.
A few weeks later, shortly after the
battle of Manassas,
