The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 4, April, 1852

Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Josephine Paolucci and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by Cornell University Digital Collections.)







THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE

Of Literature, Art, and Science.

Vol. V. NEW-YORK, APRIL 1, 1852. No. IV.




WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS, LL.D.

[Illustration]


A steadily growing reputation for almost twenty years, justified by the
gradually increasing evidence of those latent, exhaustless,
ever-unfolding energies which belong to genius, has inwoven the name of
Simms with the literature of America, and made it part of the heirloom
which our age will give to posterity. Asking and desiring nothing to
which he could not prove himself justly entitled, he has wrested a
reputation from difficulty and obstacle, and conquered an honorable
acknowledgment from opposition and indifference. Even if we had not
proofs of genius in the treasury of thought and imagination constituted
by his writings, still the nobility of the example of energy,
perseverance, and high-toned hopefulness, which he has given, would
deserve a grateful homage.

William Gilmore Simms is the second, and only surviving, of three
brothers, sons of William Gilmore Simms, and Harriet Ann Augusta
Singleton. His father was of a Scotch-Irish family, and his mother of a
Virginia stock, her grandparents having removed to South Carolina long
before the Revolution, in which they took an active part on the Whig
side. He was born on the 17th of April, 1806. His mother died when he
was an infant. His father, failing in business as a merchant, removed
first to Tennessee, and then to Mississippi. While in Tennessee he
volunteered and held a commission in the army of Jackson (in Coffee's
brigade of mounted men), which scourged the Creeks and Seminoles after
the massacre of Fort Mims. Our author, left to the care of a
grandmother, remained in Charleston, where he received an education
which circumstances rendered exceedingly limited. He was denied a
classical training, but such characters stand little in need of the
ordinary aids of the schoolmaster, and, with indomitable application, he
has not only stored his mind with the richest literature, but has
received an unsolicited tribute to his diligence and acquisitions, in
the degree of Doctor of Laws, conferred upon him by the respectable
University of Alabama.

At first it was designed that he should study medicine, but his
inclination led him to the law. He was admitted to the bar of South
Carolina when twenty-one, practised for a brief period, and became part
proprietor of a daily newspaper, which, taking ground against
nullification, ruined him--swallowing up a small maternal property, and
involving him in a heavy debt which hung upon and embarrassed him for a
long time after. In 1832, he first visited the North, where he published
Atalantis. Martin Faber followed in 1834, and periodically the long
catalogue of his subsequent performances.

There are few writers who have exhibited such versatility of powers,
combined with vigor, originality of copious and independent ideas, and
that faculty of condensation which frequently by a single pregnant line
suggests an expansive train of reflection. As a poet, he unites high
imaginative powers with metaphysical thought--by which we mean that
large discourse of reason which generalizes, and which seizes the
universal, and perceives its relations to individual phenomena of nature
and psychology. His poems abound in appropriate, felicitous, and
original similes. His keen and fresh perception of nature, furnishes him
with beautiful pictures, the truthfulness and clearness of which are
admirably presented in the lucid language with which they are painted,
and, in his expression of deep personal feelings, we find a noble union
of sad emotion and manliness of tone. He draws from a full treasury of
varied experience, active thought, close observation, just and original
reflection, and a spirit which has drank deeply and lovingly from the
gushing founts of nature. His inspiration is often kindled by the sunny
and luxuriant scenery of the beautiful region to which he was born, and
besides the freshness and glow which this imparts to his descriptive
poetry, it makes him emphatically the poet of the South. Not only has he
sung her peculiar natural aspects with the appreciation of a poet and
the feeling of a son, but he has a claim to her gratitude for having
enshrined in melodious verse her ancient and fading traditions.

Mr. Simms commenced writing verses at a very early period. At eight
years of age he rhymed the achievements of the American navy in the last
war with Great Britain. At fifteen, he was a scribbler of fugitive verse
for the newspapers, and before he was twenty-one he had published two
collections of miscellaneous poetry, which his better taste and prudence
subsequently induced him to suppress.