[In the following essay, originally delivered as an address in 1908, Smith surveys a number of enduring poems by minor pre-Civil War poets and analyzes the reasons for the lack of literary productiveness in the South before the war.]

I should belie the feelings that are uppermost in my heart tonight if I did not at the outset express my sense of appreciation and privilege at being permitted to speak to this audience on so vital a theme as that which your partiality has assigned me. The spectacle of the American people trying to find and to phrase themselves in a national literature, scanning the pages of their history that they may interpret it in terms of distinctive beauty and suggestiveness, has always been to me one of rare and compelling interest. The building of such a literature means the building of a national pantheon where we may conserve the best thought of every passing age for the inspiration of every succeeding age. Thus and thus only shall we transform a union of sovereign States into a union of sovereign ideals and make of democracy no longer an interesting experiment but an assured triumph.

No literature, however, can be truly national unless it is representative, a condition peculiarly difficult in the case of the United States because of the vast extent of territory involved. The most literary nations of the world have been England, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, and Palestine. But the United States is five times as large as these six countries combined. It is no wonder, therefore, that the history of American literature has been the history of vast sections, each endeavoring primarily to interpret its own life. In his lecture on Greek sculpture, Kekule reminds us that the masterpieces of Greek art were produced to meet the demands of a particular time and a definite generation; but these demands were apprehended with such rare insight and fulfilled with such incomparable fidelity that the particular found itself interpreted in terms of the elemental and universal. Shakespeare's lines are as applicable to art as to ethics:

To thine own self be true
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

When I speak, therefore, of Southern literature, I do not use the phrase in a narrow or provincial sense. The adjective designates the place of origin but implies no sectionalism of spirit or limitation of appeal. I mean by Southern literature the artesian attempt made on Southern soil to penetrate to the elemental and universal. If you ask me why the phrase Southern literature is more frequently heard than the phrase New England literature, I reply that it is because the New Englanders sank the first wells and with characteristic promptness gave the name American to the first outflowings. Sidney Lanier is as American as Longfellow, and the literature of the South as truly national as that of New England.

Much has been written of late to explain the literary unproductiveness of the Old South, by which I mean the South prior to the year 1870. In oratory and statesmanship the Old South can challenge comparison with any nation and with any age. And the variety of her oratory was equal to its excellence. From the ringing sentences of Patrick Henry, the simple but nation-building utterances of Washington and Jefferson and Madison, the incisive repartee of John Randolph of Roanoke, the interpretative genius of Marshall, the analytic acumen of Calhoun, the impetuous yet graceful periods of Henry Clay, to the spendthrift eloquence of Sergeant Smith Prentiss, there is hardly a note in the whole gamut of civic oratory or constructive statesmanship which the South did not sound and sound with the ease of a master. But in the realm of literature proper—the realm of the essay, the novel, and the poem—the Old South was as signally deficient as she was illustrious in debate and statecraft.

Before attempting to assign reasons for this literary unproductiveness, I wish to glance briefly at the poetic achievement of the Old South which, though meager, has not been appraised at its true worth. One small volume would hold all of the poems written in the South before 1870 that seem destined to maintain their place in American literature. Such a volume would contain selections from Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Timrod, Paul Hamilton Hayne, and Father Ryan. The best textbooks of American literature pay just tribute to the works of these four poets, but they fail to record the fact that the Old South was richer in poems than in poets. There are at least seven short poems which, though written by minor poets, have attained such national vogue as to be found in every up-to-date anthology of American poetry or list of most popular American poems. The authors of these seven poems may justly be called “singers of one song,” but the lasting acclaim that each song has received reminds us that

Time, who soonest drops the heaviest things
That weight his pack, will carry diamonds long.

The first of these is “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key of Maryland. With one exception, that of Hopkinson's “Hail Columbia,” Key's poem is the first permanent contribution made to the patriotic poetry of America and is the only poem of note called forth by the war of 1812. The refrain,

The land of the free and the home of the brave,

is at least as widely current a quotation as American literature can show.

In the following year, 1815, appeared “The Captive's Lament” by Richard Henry Wilde, an adopted citizen of Georgia. The poem is better known by its first line, “My life is like the summer rose.” The last stanza, though the least familiar, is easily the best:

My life is like the prints which feet
          Have left on Tampa's desert strand;
Soon as the rising tide shall beat
          All trace will vanish from the sand.
Yet, as if grieving to efface
All vestige of the human race,
On that lone shore loud moans the sea,
But none, alas, shall mourn for me!

The next to the last line has been often cited as a perfect blend of sound and sense, and Byron wrote at once to congratulate Wilde on having written “the finest poem of the century.” And yet such was the popular attitude in this country toward the writing of poetry that Wilde was unwilling to admit the authorship of this poem until compelled to deny that it had been written by others.

In 1825 there appeared a thin volume of poems by Edward Coate Pinkney of Maryland. One of these was entitled “A Health,” and it is no disparagement of Ben Johnson's famous lines to say that the English language does not contain a toast the equal of Pinkney's in purity of sentiment or faultlessness of structure:

I fill this cup to one made up
          Of loveliness alone,
A woman, of her gentle sex
          The seeming paragon;
To whom the better elements
          And kindly stars have given
A form so fair, that, like the air,
          'Tis less of earth than heaven.
Her every tone is music's own,
          Like those of morning birds.
And something more than melody
          Dwells ever in her words;
The coinage of her heart are they,
          And from her lips each flows
As one may see the burdened bee
          Forth issue from the rose
I fill this cup to one made up
          Of loveliness alone,
A woman, of her gentle sex
          The seeming paragon—
Her health! and would on earth there stood
          Some more of such a frame,
That life might be all poetry,
          And weariness a name.

The next occasional poem to fill a niche in popular appreciation was “Florence Vane,” published in 1847, by Philip Pendleton Cooke, a brother of John Esten Cooke of Virginia. Instead of a selection from this exquisite lyric, which is too close-woven to bear fragmentary quotation, let me substitute an extract from one of Cooke's letters: “What do you think of a friend of mine,” he writes, “a most valuable and worthy and hard-riding one, saying gravely to me a short time ago?—‘I wouldn't waste time on a d—d thing like poetry. You might make yourself, with all your sense and judgment, a useful man in settling neighborhood disputes and difficulties.’” Beneath the humor of it, which Cooke was broad enough to feel, there is yet the pathos of the chilling environment, the uncongenial public opinion, which in his case and many others made of literature an avocation rather than a vocation.

Near the close of 1847 Theodore O'Hara wrote “The Bivouac of the Dead.” The poem “marched to the front in detachments,” quotations from it becoming popular long before the name of the poem or its author was generally known. O'Hara was later a Confederate soldier and the highest tribute to his genius was paid by the men against whom he fought. “A stroll through any of our national cemeteries,” says a New York writer, “will suggest the idea that the War Department has official knowledge of but one elegiac poem.”

If “The Bivouac of the Dead” is the best martial elegy in American literature, Randall's “Maryland, My Maryland” is the most stirring martial lyric. Oliver Wendell Holmes voiced the consensus of critical opinion North and South when he pronounced it “the best poem produced on either side during the Civil War.” Its occasional intemperance of expression only adds to the faithfulness of its portrayal of contemporary conditions and enables us to measure the distance traversed from that day to this. The appearance of Mr. Randall at the Jamestown Exposition on “Maryland Day” as the guest of honor of the people of Maryland was a beautiful tribute of the industrial New South to the literary Old South, and his death three months ago marked the passing of the last figure that helped to make illustrious the annals of our antebellum literature.

The last poem that I shall mention, “Little Giffen of Tennessee,” by Dr. Francis O. Ticknor of Georgia, appeared in 1867 in the columns of The Land We Love, a magazine edited at Charlotte, North Carolina, by General D. H. Hill. It is the true story of a wounded Confederate boy who was nursed back to health by Doctor and Mrs. Ticknor. But in a larger sense it typifies the story of hundreds of young Confederate heroes, mere striplings, in whose boy hands the sword was mightier than the pen. In the simplicity of its pathos, the intensity of its appeal, and the dramatic compression of its thought, “Little Giffen,” though last in time, is first in rank of all the poems yet cited:

Out of the foremost and focal fire,
Out of the hospital walls as dire,
Smitten of grapeshot and gangrene,
Eighteenth battle and he sixteen—
Specter such as you seldom see,
Little Giffen of Tennessee.
‘Take him and welcome,’ the surgeon said,
‘Not the doctor can help the dead.’
So we took him and brought him where
The balm was sweet in our summer air;
And we laid him down on a wholesome bed,
Utter Lazarus, heel to head!
And we watched the war with abated breath!
Skeleton boy 'gainst skeleton death!
Months of torture, now many such!
Weary weeks of the stick and the crutch,—
And still a glint in the steel-blue eye
Told of a spirit that wouldn't die.
And didn't! Nay, more, in death's despite
The crippled skeleton learned to write.
‘Dear Mother,’ at first, of course, and then
‘Dear Captain,’ inquiring about the men.
Captain's answer: ‘Of eighty and five
Giffen and I are left alive.’
‘Johnston pressed at the front,’ they say;
Little Giffen was up and away.
A tear, his first, as he bade good-by,
Dimmed the glint of his steel-blue eye;
‘I'll write, if spared.’ There was news of the fight
But none of Giffen—he did not write.
I sometimes fancy that were I king
Of the courtly knights of Arthur's ring,
With the voice of the minstrel in mine ear
And the tender legend that trembles here,—
I'd give the best on his bended knee,
The whitest soul of my chivalry,
For little Giffen of Tennessee.

Such, then, was the contribution to American literature of some of the minor poets of the South, a contribution ignored in current textbooks of American literature because these treat of poets rather than of poems. When we add to these seven poems the more voluminous contributions of Hayne, Timrod, and especially Poe, whose influence on foreign literatures far exceeds that of any other American poet, it must be conceded that the contribution of the Old South to the poetry of the nation has been generally underrated. The question, however, still confronts us, why was not the South before 1870 more distinctively literary?

The problem is a difficult one. The Southern people were of almost unmixed Anglo-Saxon stock. Their social refinement, their responsive temperament, and their quick intelligence were matters of frequent comment by outside visitors. Their intellectual vigor and administrative efficiency were exemplified in the careers of numerous political and military leaders. They lived close to nature and knew her laws. The romantic charm of their colonial and revolutionary history drew from Bryant his Song of Marion's Men, from Longfellow his Evangeline, and from Thackeray his Virginians. Copies of Shakespeare, Milton, Addison, and Scott were found in every cultured home. A New York bookseller wrote that his costliest invoices of European literature went “to the old mansions on the banks of the James and the Savannah and the bluffs of the Mississippi.”

Joseph Le Conte, the great geologist, in his recent autobiography relates that he learned from the lips of a South Carolina planter his first lessons in evolution long before Darwin had published his great work. “Nothing could be more remarkable,” adds Le Conte, “than the wide reading, the deep reflection, the refined culture, and the originality of thought and observation characteristic of them [the Southern planters]; and yet the idea of publication never entered their heads.”

It was not, then, to lack of culture that lack of literature must be accredited. Other reasons must be sought. Mr. Philip Alexander Bruce, the scholarly historian of Virginia, says: “The only plausible reason is that, unlike Old England and New England, the Southern States before the abolition of slavery were entirely lacking in a literary center,” there being “no city in the South approaching either London or Boston.” Mr. Thomas Nelson Page adduces five reasons:

• (1) The people of the South were an agricultural people, widely diffused, and lacking the stimulus of immediate mental contact.
• (2) The absence of cities, which in the history of literary life have proved literary foci essential for its production, and the want of publishing-houses in the South.
• (3) The exactions of the institution of slavery, and the absorption of the intellectual forces of the people of the South in the solution of the vital problems it engendered.
• (4) The general ambition of the Southern people for political distinction, and the application of their literary powers to polemical controversy.
• (5) The absence of a reading public in the South for American authors, due in part to the conservatism of the Southern people.

It seems to me that the different reasons advanced may all be subsumed under one unitary principle, a principle which finds abundant illustration in the history of England and America. Great literary movements are the expression of national awakenings. They pre-suppose a quickening of the national life and a broadening of the national outlook. They imply the presence of some mighty influence that brings about community of interest and effort together with the emancipation of hope and vision. Such an influence must integrate rather than sectionalize. There must be provided also the material means of embodying and diffusing the new ideals. Literature on a large scale implies authorship as a profession, and authorship as a profession has never flowered among a poor people. These twofold conditions, the twin demands of spirit and body, are more nearly fulfilled by great industrial movements than by any other movements known to history. Literary productiveness, in other words, is vitally related to industrial productiveness, both being correlative manifestations of the creative spirit.

No more striking confirmation of this principle could be adduced than the fact that every great industrial era in English and American history has accompanied or immediately preceded a literary era. As this fact has been generally overlooked, let me call briefly to your attention the three great industrial periods of modern times. I shall merely sketch these periods, leaving to you the pleasure of filling in the outlines at your leisure. The facts are undisputed and may be found in any up-to-date history of modern industrialism.

(1) The first industrial revolution came in the reign of Elizabeth (1558-1603). All through the Middle Ages the little country of Flanders, just across the channel from England, had been the manufactory of Europe. England did not manufacture her own wool; she sent it to Flanders, to be received back in fine textile goods. But in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, for reasons which I need not enumerate, Flemish refugees came to England, taught the English peasantry their industrial arts, and, for the first time, England ceased to be dependent on Flanders and became herself a wool manufacturing country. This economic change is of vast significance, and the parallel between the industrial conditions of Elizabeth's reign and the industrial conditions in the South since 1870 is full of interest and suggestiveness. In this parallel cotton replaces wool, for cotton did not then figure in English history as an industrial factor.

The manufacturing population was not confined to the English towns, but spread all over the country. Even North England, which had lagged far behind South England (here we must reverse our parallel), now showed signs of intense industrial activity and entered into healthy competition with the more southern sections. Of course it was all domestic manufacture; it was handiwork. But England increased rapidly in wealth, in commercial power, in all that constitutes material prosperity.

The keels of Elizabeth's bold freebooters, Raleigh, Drake, Frobisher, and Hawkins, vexed all seas and brought treasure from all shores. Sir Thomas Gresham founded the first Royal Exchange. England felt as never before the thrill of a new industrial life and the thrill of a rounded nationalism born of industrial freedom. I have often thought that when Shakespeare speaks so proudly of,

This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

there passed before his eye not only a vision of armed and warlike England girt by fearless defenders, but a vision of happy English homes filled with the peace and contentment that spring from self-supporting toil.

Elizabeth's reign was, then, peculiarly an industrial epoch. I need not tell you that her reign was and is the glory of English letters. It is needless to rehearse those illustrious names that will perish only with the language that you and I speak. My purpose is merely to show that in this wonderful period literature found a friend in industrialism. Both were agencies of national expression. Industrialism spoke in works, literature in words. And if industrialism deepened the sense of national greatness, literature gave voice to the new consciousness.

(2) Let us pass now to another industrial revolution nearer our own time. In 1775, a memorable date in our history, James Watt began the manufacture of steam-engines. The change from the domestic system of industrialism to the modern method of production by machinery and steam-power was sudden and violent. Before the year 1800 all the great inventions of Watt, Arkwright, Boulton, and Hargreaves had been completed and the modern factory system inaugurated. The writers on industrial history tell us that “England increased her wealth tenfold and gained a hundred years' start in front of the nations of Europe.” In fifteen years (1788-1803) the cotton trade trebled itself.

Of course vigorous protests were made against this spirit of rampant industrialism. Thomas DeQuincey, then only fifteen years of age, complained in 1800 that he could not stir out of doors without being “nosed by a factory, a cotton bag, a cotton dealer, or something else allied to that detestable commerce.” The Jeremiahs and Cassandras believed that everything was going to the “demnition bow-wows.”

But what was literature doing? She was witnessing a renaissance second only to that of “the spacious times of great Elizabeth.” This was her romantic period, her liberal era, the age that nourished Keats, Shelley, Byron, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Burns, and Burke. In a love of nature that made all seasons seem as spring, in devotion to democratic ideals, in variety and range and intensity of feeling, this period takes precedence of Elizabeth's reign. The literary outburst can best be described in Coleridge's lines:

And now 'twas like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute;
And now it was an angel's song
          That makes the heavens be mute.

It was of this age that Wordsworth said:

Joy was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.

(3) There has been but one other great industrial era marked by wide-reaching discovery and fruitful invention. It falls within the fifteen years from 1830 to 1845. Those years are the storage battery of both the industrial and the literary forces that have shaped the Victorian era. In those years railroads first began to intersect the land, telegraph lines were first stretched, and the ocean was crossed for the first time by steam-propelled vessels. All of these mechanical triumphs tended to annihilate time and space. The products of manufacturing could now be sent to the most distant quarters. Nations came closer together. The two hemispheres became and have continued one vast arena of industrial interchange. Even Tennyson catches the industrial inspiration, and in 1842 celebrates in the same breath the glories of invention and the triumphs of commerce:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.

But let us look at the purely literary record of these years. The English writers who dominated the literary life of the Victorian era, and who bid fair to dominate many decades of our present century, are Tennyson, Browning, and Mrs. Browning in poetry; Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot in fiction; Ruskin and Carlyle in miscellaneous literature. Every one of these writers rose to prominence between 1830 and 1845. Before 1830 they were unknown; by 1845, not to know them was to confess inexcusable ignorance.

But our own country furnishes as striking illustrations. Of the three industrial movements enumerated, the first could, of course, have no effect upon American life, the initial settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock being themselves a part of the mighty influence that made Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age possible. The second industrial revolution, that beginning in 1775, found also no foothold upon American soil. The thirteen colonies were struggling for their very existence as an independent people. There was neither time nor opportunity for great industrial changes or for community of literary effort. Leadership was necessarily either political or military.

By 1830, however, when the third industrial revolution began, there was one section of our country peculiarly adapted to prove hospitable to it. The New England States, by their small holdings instead of large plantations, by their harbor facilities and rapid rivers, by their township groupings and the resultant ascendancy of the meeting house, by the very texture of their institutional life, were admirably fitted to assimilate the new influences and to assume at once the industrial leadership. This they did, and the change in their literary life was as instantly manifest. Before 1830 New England had no distinctive literature, but by 1840 she was represented by Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Holmes, the six names that have given the New England States their incontestable supremacy in American literature.

Why did not the South respond to this literary and industrial movement? Why did she wait until 1870? Because in 1830 her energies began to be more and more absorbed in defense of her constitutional views and of her cherished institutions. The year 1830 that ushered in the era of opportunity to others, saw the memorable debate between Robert Y. Hayne, of South Carolina, and Daniel Webster—the most significant content that the senate of the United States has ever witnessed. It was the opening cannon of a struggle that was to end only on the field of Appomattox. Sectional lines began to be drawn closer and closer. The South was thrown more and more on the defensive. She was shut in more and more from outside influences. Her industrial system, based on slave labor, stood as a barrier to the new industrial movement; and the enforced defense of this system, together with the political problems and prejudices that it engendered, threw literature into the background and brought oratory and statesmanship to the front.

But a change came at last and in the storm and night of war the old order passed, yielding place to new. The ultimate literary significance of the Civil War you and I may not live to see, but if history proves anything it proves that literature loves a lost cause, provided honor be not lost. Hector, the leader of the defeated Trojans, Hector the warrior, slain in defense of his own fireside, is the most princely figure that the Greek Homer has portrayed. The Roman Virgil is proud to trace the lineage of his people not back to the victorious Greeks, but on to the defeated Trojans. England's greatest poet laureate finds his amplest inspiration not in the victories of his Saxon ancestors over King Arthur, but in King Arthur himself and his peerless Knights of the Round Table, vanquished though they were in battle. And so it has always been; the brave but unfortunate reap always the richest measure of literary immortality.

Do you remember that tender scene in King Lear, where Cordelia stands in the presence of her father, despised, disinherited, forsaken? As her cowardly suitor slinks from the room because Cordelia's inheritance has been lost, the King of France steps forward and on bended knee says:

Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor;
Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised;
Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon;
Be it lawful, I take up what's cast away.

And so when brave men have fought for the right, as God gave them to see the right, but fought in vain; when the bugles call no more; when the banners are tattered and trailing; when the shouts of victory are forever hushed, and the miserere of defeat is chanted over the graves of a buried army; when all, all, is lost save honor, it is then that the muses of poetry and song stoop from their celestial heights and lift the dear old lost cause up, up, into the unchanging realm of literature.

We are still too near to that great struggle to trace the exact orbit of its influence upon the poetry of the future. It will doubtless find expression in some stately epic or in some cluster of great dramas. There will be no bitterness in the story, no note of grievance, no weak or passionate regret. There will be only the common love of the heroic and the beautiful. A united nation will find in it the treasury of a sacred past, the pledge and promise of an enduring future.

The immediate effect of the Civil War, however, was industrial and economic. The South had not before undergone any essential change in her industrial system, but no part of the country has ever undergone so sudden and so radical an upheaval. Influences from without and impulses from within, both of which, forty years before, had beat unavailingly against the barriers of an antiquated system, now passed freely through open doors. Literature was not slow to heed the challenge of the time. With new economic ideas, with an ever-increasing development of her natural resources, with a subdivision of her ancestral lands, with a more flexible industrial system, with a more rational attitude toward labor, and more diffused facilities for knowledge, there came to the South a literary inspiration impossible before. And the year 1870, which statisticians take as the birth-year of the new industrial movement in the South, is also the birth-year of the new literary movement. The open door of 1870 has more than made amends for the closed door of 1830. The words which Sidney Lanier wrote to his wife in 1870 may be taken in a larger sense than he meant them: “Day by day … a thousand vital elements rill through my soul. Day by day the secret deep forces gather, which will presently display themselves in bending leaf and waxy petal and in useful fruit and grain.”

Hardly were those words written before Irwin Russell, of Mississippi, opened a new province to American literature by his skillful delineations of negro character. In 1872 Maurice Thompson is hailed by Longfellow as “a new and original singer, fresh, joyous, and true.” In 1875 Sidney Lanier attains national fame, and the six years of life that remained to him were to be filled with bursts of imperishable song. In 1876 Joel Chandler Harris annexed the province that Irwin Russell had discovered, and “Uncle Remus” quietly assumed a place in the literature of humor and folklore never filled till then. In 1878 Miss Murfree, better known as Charles Egbert Craddock, began her inimitable sketches of the illiterate mountaineers of East Tennessee. The decade closed with the appearance in literature of George W. Cable, whose Grandissimes, however questionable as history, is unquestionable as art.

The next decade, that from 1880 to 1890, witnessed the advent of Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, Mr. James Lane Allen, and Mr. Madison Cawein. Mr. Page in his “Marse Chan” and “Meh Lady” not only presented the relation of master and slave in a new light, but furnished at the same time the long-looked-for exposure of the latent injustice and one-sidedness of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The historical value to the South, therefore, of stories like these, to say nothing of their literary charm, cannot be easily overrated. Mr. Allen in his Sketches of the Blue Grass Region of Kentucky brought another state into the literary union and spread the charm of a storied past over a region that had long ago led Henry Ward Beecher to say: “Henceforth, to me, the twenty-third psalm shall read, ‘He maketh me to lie down in blue grass pastures.’” Mr. Cawein in his Blooms of the Berry struck clearly, if tentatively, the first note of a song that was later to approve him the great nature poet of his age. “No other poet,” Mr. Howells has just said, “not even of the great Elizabethan range, can outword this poet when it comes to choosing some epithet fresh from the earth or air, and with the morning sun or light upon it, for an emotion or experience in which the race renews its youth from generation to generation.” It is from Louisville, Kentucky, writes Mr. Edmund Gosse, that “the only hermit-thrush now seems to sing.” But I need not call the roll further. It is enough to say that in 1888, just eighteen years after the beginning of the new movement, ex-Judge Albion W. Tourgee, whom no one could charge with undue Southern sympathies, declared (in The Forum of December) that a foreigner studying the contemporary literature of the United States “without knowledge of our history, and judging our civilization by our fiction, would undoubtedly conclude that the South was the seat of intellectual empire in America.” What a literary revolution do those words indicate!

This is neither the time nor the place to attempt an appraisal of the new school of Southern writers. But they are rendering one service so signal in importance that it cannot be overlooked in even the most cursory survey of their work. It is often said that the South has produced no historian and that her history remains, therefore, unknown. The real historians of the South are the writers whom I have mentioned. Enshrine history in literature and you give it both currency and permanency. The world knows Scottish history not from Burton's learned volumes but from the glowing pages of Walter Scott and Robert Burns.

And what for this frail world, were all
          That mortals do or suffer,
Did no responsive harp, no pen,
          Memorial tribute offer?

The formal historian may galvanize the past, but the poet and story-teller vitalize it.

When Rufus Choate, in 1833, made his impassioned plea for the perpetuation of New England history by a series of poems and romances, the outlook was far from encouraging. New England had then no distinctive literature, nor had a single poet or prose-writer touched with the wand of his genius any event or locality in New England history. But in less than ten years from the time of Mr. Choate's address Emerson had written his great Concord Hymn, and Hawthorne his Twice-Told Tales. The movement was now on, and in rapid succession Mosses from an Old Manse, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Paul Revere's Ride completed a cycle that has done more to popularize the history of Massachusetts than all the historians from William Bradford to John Fiske.

It is an interesting fact in the history of American literature that Longfellow himself began his poetical career by finding his inspiration and his themes in the history and legends of foreign lands. But the criticism of Margaret Fuller led him to see that his own country had poetical material as well as Spain and Germany. It was then that Longfellow gave to the world his trilogy of poems dealing with American life. And Evangeline, Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish remain today as Longfellow's surest guarantee of immortality. Southern writers do not merit the rebuke of Margaret Fuller, for they are finding their themes and their inspiration in the life that is near and dear to them. They are not rising into solitary and selfish renown; they are lifting the South with them. They are writing Southern history because they are interpreting Southern life.