Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Robert Prince, and the
Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
To the memory of the gallant little lad who bore his grandfather'sname and image—to the dear remembrance of:
Barron Hope Marr
His mother dedicates whatsoever there may be of worth in her effortto show James Barron Hope, the Poet, as Virginia's Laureate, andJames Barron Hope, the Man, as he was loved and reverenced by hishousehold and his friends.
It has been claimed for James Barron Hope that he was "Virginia'sLaureate." He did not deal in "abstractions, or generalized arguments,"or vague mysticisms. He fired the imagination purely, he awoke loftythoughts and presented, through his noble odes that which is the soulof "every true poem, a living succession of concrete images andpictures."
James Barron, the elder, organized the Virginia Colonial Navy, ofwhich he was commander-in-chief during the Revolution, and his sons,Samuel and James, served gallantly in the United States Navy. It wasfrom these ancestors that James Barron Hope derived that unswervingdevotion to his native state for which he was remarkable, and it wasat the residence of his grandfather, Commodore James Barron, theyounger, who then commanded the Gosport Navy-yard, that he was bornthe 23d of March, 1829.
His mother, Jane Barron, was the eldest daughter of the Commodoreand most near to his regard. An attractive gentlewoman of the oldschool, generous, of quick and lively sympathies, she wielded aclever, ready pen, and the brush and embroiderer's needle in amanner not to be scorned in those days, and was a personage in herfamily.
Her child was the child not only of her material, but of herspiritual being, and the two were closely knit as the years passed,in mutual affection and confidence, in tastes and aspirations.
His father was Wilton Hope of "Bethel," Elizabeth City County, ahandsome, talented man, a landed proprietor, of a family whose acresbordered the picturesque waters of Hampton River.
He gained his early education at Germantown, Pennsylvania, and at
the "Academy" in Hampton, Virginia, under his venerated master, John
B. Cary, Esq.,—the master who declares himself proud to say,
"I taught him"—the invaluable friend of all his after years.
In 1847 he graduated from William and Mary College with the degreeof A.B.
From the "Pennsylvania," upon which man-of-war he was secretary tohis uncle, Captain Samuel Barron, he was transferred to the"Cyane," and in 1852 made a cruise to the West Indies.
In 1856 he was elected Commonwealth's attorney to the "game-cocktown of Virginia," historic and picturesque old Hampton, which wasthe centre of a charming and cultivated society and which hadalready claimed him as her "bard." For as Henry Ellen he hadcontributed to various southern publications, his poems in "TheSouthern Literary Messenger" attracting much gratifying attention.
In 1857 Lippincott brought out "Leoni di Monota and Other Poems."The volume was cordially noticed by the southern critics of the time,not only for its central poem, but also for several of its minor ones,notably, "The Charge at Balaklava," which G.P.R. James—as haveothers since—declared unsurpassed by Tennyson's "Charge of theLight Brigade."
...