danger from the insincerity which besets a speech or a literature which relies on conventional phrasing until the original locutions lose their original vitality.[32] [32] A corresponding danger on the other hand is that a people who abjure all such phrases will abjure also the things for which they stand, until they become irredeemably prosaic and matter of fact. Timrod as a youthful versifier passed through his period of unconvincing extravagance, and even in his earlier work showed by occasional flashes that he had his own gift for expression as well as a receptive mind for poetry. In 1859 his first book of poems was published. It had the coveted distinction of the Ticknor and Fields, Boston, imprint, but it was indubitably the utterance of a Charleston poet. The sonnet "I know not why, but all this weary day" is full of genuine feeling, and in its ominous despair foretells the coming war: Now it has been a vessel losing way, Rounding a stormy headland; now a gray Dull waste of clouds above a wintry main; And then, a banner, drooping in the rain, And meadows beaten into bloody clay. Timrod's two greater poems were dedicated to the Confederacy. They are the outpourings of loyalty to the shortlived nation, full of passion, no freer from hate and recrimination than the average poems from the North, but positive in their ardent faith in the beneficent part the Confederacy was to play in future history. Like all other war poets he suffered from the embittering effects of the conflict. His first inclination was to think more about his hopes for the South than about his hatred of the North; yet even in "The Cotton Boll" and in "Ethnogenesis" he saw red at times, as any human partisan was bound to do. The newly federated South was to send out from its whitened fields an idealized cotton crop that "only bounds its blessings by mankind." The labors of the planter were to strengthen the sinews of the world. Yet into this finely altruistic mood came the acrid thought of the war which was in progress, and in a moment he was vilifying the "Goth" in the same breath that he was resolving to be merciful. Timrod endured without flinching as an individual. As a confederate patriot he dreamed Not only for the glories which the years Shall bring us; not for lands from sea to sea, And wealth, and power, and peace, though these shall be; But for the distant peoples we shall bless, And the hushed murmurs of a world's distress. But when the war was over, in his "Address to the Old Year" (1866) he was all for complete and speedy reconciliation. A time of peaceful prayer, Of law, love, labor, honest loss and gain-- These are the visions of the coming reign Now floating to them on this wintry air.