He was
taken prisoner, and placed in Point Lookout Prison, where Lanier also was
confined. After the war, Tabb devoted some time to music and taught school.
His studies led him toward the church, and at the age of thirty-nine he
received the priest's orders in the Roman Catholic church. When he died in
1909, he was a teacher in St. Charles College, Ellicott City, Maryland. He
had been blind for two years.
Tabb's poems are preeminently "short swallow-flights of song," for most of
them are only from four to eight lines long. Some of these verses are
comic, while others are grave and full of religious ardor. The most
beautiful of all his poems are those of nature. The one called _The Brook_
is among the brightest and most fanciful:--
"It is the mountain to the sea
That makes a messenger of me:
And, lest I loiter on the way
And lose what I am sent to say,
He sets his reverie to song
And bids me sing it all day long.
Farewell! for here the stream is slow,
And I have many a mile to go."
[Footnote: _Poems_, 1894.]
_The Water Lily_ is another dainty product, full of poetic feeling for
nature:--
"Whence, O fragrant form of light,
Hast thou drifted through the night,
Swanlike, to a leafy nest,
On the restless waves, at rest?
"Art thou from the snowy zone
Of a mountain-summit blown,
Or the blossom of a dream,
Fashioned in the foamy stream?"
[Footnote: _The Water Lily_, from _Poems_, 1894.
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