that Father Ryan should bless and bury its conquered banner, when the
bitter day came that saw it "furled forever."

But is that proud flag--with the glory and the pride wrought into its
folds, by suffering, honor and endurance unexcelled--really "furled
forever?" The dust of centuries may sift upon it, but the moth and the
mold may harm it not. Ages it may lie, furled and unnoted; but in her
own good time, historic Justice shall yet unfold and throw it to the
breeze of immortality; pointing to each glorious rent and to each holy
drop that stains it!

The war-poetry of the South has been dwelt upon, perhaps, at too great
length. But it was, in real truth, the literature of the South. To sum
it up may be repeated, after a lapse of twenty-five years--that
sentence from the preface to my "South Songs," which raised such ire
among irreconcilables of the southern press:--"In prose of all kinds,
the South stood still, during the war; perhaps retrograded. But her
best aspiration, 'lisped in numbers, for the numbers came!'"

Even then her poetry proved that there was life--high, brave life--in
the old land yet; even then it gave earnest that, when the bitter
struggle for bread gave time for thought, reason and retrospect,
southern literature would rise, in the might of a young giant, and
shake herself wholly free from northern domination and convention.

In art and her twin sister, music, the South displayed taste and
progress truly remarkable in view of the absorbing nature of her
duties. Like all inhabitants of semi-tropic climes, there had ever been
shown by her people natural love and aptitude for melody. While this
natural taste was wholly uncultivated--venting largely in plantation
songs of the negroes--in districts where the music-master was
necessarily abroad, it had reached high development in several of the
large cities. Few of these were large enough, or wealthy enough, to
support good operas, which the wealth of the North frequently lured to
itself; but it may be recalled that New Orleans was genuinely enjoying
opera, as a necessary of life, long before New York deemed it essential
to study bad translations of librettos, in warmly-packed congregations
of thousands.

Mobile, Charleston, Savannah and other cities also had considerable
latent music among their amateurs; happily not then brought to the
surface by the fierce friction of poverty. And what was the musical
talent of the Capital, has elsewhere been hint