ayne, Timrod and McCord were the few
names that had gone over the border. Up to that time, however, the
South had never produced any great poem, that was to stand _aere
perennius_. But that there was a vast amount of latent poetry in our
people was first developed by the terrible friction of war.

In the dead-winter watches of the camp, in the stricken homes of the
widow and the childless, and in the very prison pens, where they were
crushed under outrage and contumely--the souls of the southrons rose in
song.

The varied and stirring acts of that terrible drama--its trying
suspense and harrowing shocks--its constant strain and privations must
have graven deep upon southern hearts a picture of that time; and there
it will stand forever, distinct--indelible--etched by the mordant of
sorrow!

Where does history show more stirring motives for poetry? Every rood of
earth, moistened and hallowed with sacred blood, sings to-day a noble
dirge, wordless, but how eloquent! No whitewashed ward in yonder
hospital, but has written in letters of life its epic of heroism, of
devotion, and of triumphant sacrifice!

Every breeze that swept from those ravished homes, whence peace and
purity had fled before the sword, the torch and that far
blacker--nameless horror!--each breeze bore upon its wing a pleading
prayer for peace, mingled and drowned in the hoarse notes of a stirring
cry to arms!

But not only did our people feel all this. They spoke it with universal
voice--in glowing, burning words that will live so long as strength and
tenderness and truth shall hold their own in literature.

For reasons thus roughly sketched, no great and connected effort had
been made at the South before the war. Though there had been sudden and
fitful flashes of rare warmth and promise, they had died before their
fire was communicated. That the fire was there, latent and still, they
bore witness; but it needed the rough and cruel friction of the war to
bring it to the surface.

What the southron felt he spoke; and out of the bitterness of his trial
the poetry of the South was born. It leaped at one bound from the
overcharged brain of our people--full statured in its stern defiance
mailed in the triple panoply of truth.

There was endless poetry written in the North on the war; and much of
it came from the pens of men as eminent as Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier
and Holmes. But they wrote far away from the scenes they spoke
of--comfortably house