As Doctor Matthews well says, there is often a feeling afloat in the minds of men, undefined and vague for want of one to give it form, and held in solution, as it were, until a chance word dropped in the ear of a poet suddenly crystallizes this feeling into song, in which all may see clearly and sharply reflected what in their own thought was shapeless and hazy. It was young Randall's fortune to be the instrument through which the South spoke, and, by a natural reaction, his burning lines helped "fire the Southern heart." The form of the poem was suggested by Mangan's _Karamanian Exile_,-- "I see thee ever in my dreams, Karaman! Thy hundred hills, thy thousand streams, Karaman, O Karaman! As when thy gold-bright morning gleams, As when the deepening sunset seams With lines of light thy hills and streams, Karaman! So now thou loomest on my dreams, Karaman, O Karaman!" The previous use of this form, which is perhaps the most effective possible for a battle hymn, by no means detracts from Randall's stirring poem. The poem would never have had great effect, however, if it had not been fortunate in drafting to its service a splendid piece of music. Miss Hattie Cary, of Baltimore, afterward the wife of Professor H. M. Martin, of Johns-Hopkins University, brought about the wedding which enabled Randall's song to reach every camp-fire of the Southern armies. "The Glee Club was to hold its meeting in our parlors one evening early in June," she writes, "and my sister Jennie, being the only musical member of the family, had charge of the program on the occasion. With a schoolgirl's eagerness to score a success, she resolved to secure some new and ardent expression of feelings that were by this time wrought up to the point of explosion. In vain she searched through her stock of songs and airs--nothing seemed intense enough to suit her. Aroused by her tone of despair, I came to the rescue with the suggestion that she should adapt the words of _Maryland, my Maryland_, which had been constantly on my lips since the appearance of the lyric a few days before in the South. I produced the paper and began declaiming the verses. '_Lauriger Horatius_,' she exclaimed, and in a flash the immortal song found a voice in the stirring air so perfectly adapted to it. That night when her contralto voice rang out the stanzas, the refrain rolled forth from every throat without pause or preparation; and the enthusiasm communicated itself with such effect to the crowd assembled beneath our windows as to endanger seriously the liberties of the party." This air was originally an old German student melody used for a lovely German lyric, _Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum_, which Longfellow has numbered among his translations. The first verse is as follows,--