It was the end of Brownell's service and travels. Four years later, on October 31, 1872, at the height of the Grant-Greeley campaign, he died at the family homestead after a long and distressing illness. He had been born in 1820. Seven years before his death Dr. Holmes, in a review in the "Atlantic" of one of his slim volumes of verse, had called him "Our Battle Laureate." Uneven as his verse was, he was a true poet. A spark of the divine fire had fallen upon him. Other activities had been attempted, but for him there clearly was in them no satisfaction. As a youth he tried mercantile life in New York, but abandoned it after less than a year. Teaching seems to have been the practical--if poetry is not "practical"--pursuit which proved most congenial and it is singular that his first work as a teacher was in Mobile near which the great experience of his life later occurred. This short sojourn in the South came after his graduation in 1841 from Trinity College and was followed by study of the law in Hartford where he was admitted to the bar and for a short time practiced in partnership with his brother Charles. But the law was not for him. The poetic muse was always whispering in his ear. He saw visions and dreamed dreams--witness his "Song of the Archangels." Yet he was rather a direct and rugged sort of poet. Subtlety and indirection, fine shadings, carefully wrought lines, had little place in his methods. He appears to have been impatient of revision. He felt deeply and the need of expression was instant. Often he wrote, as he states in the preface to "Lyrics of a Day," _currente calamo_, and most of his verses were seen first in the pages of the Hartford newspapers. In the light of modern technique many of them seem already a little old-fashioned. Perhaps the present-day undergraduate would call some of them "simple." Yet any of our young intellectuals might be proud of having written "In Articulo Mortis"; surely there is nothing very simple about "The Sphinx." And one is occasionally startled by lines that have the perfect, the inevitable phrase--as in these from "The Tomb of Columbus"-- ". . . . the fragrant breath Of unknown tropic flowers came o'er my path, Wafted--how pleasantly! for I had been Long on the seas, and their soft, waveless glare Had made green fields a longing." It would be difficult to improve on that last line. Again--to most readers there will come a swift and dramatic vision from the two stanzas of "Qu'il Mourut"-- "Not a sob, not a tear be spent For those who fell at his side-- But a moan and a long lament For him--who might have died! "Who might have lain, as Harold lay, A King, and in state enow-- Or slept with his peers, like Roland In the Straits of Roncesvaux."