d Charleston to prepare the soul for their riveting.

Unfortunately, the teacher of that school thus honored by the presence
of two budding poets had not a mind attuned to poesy. Seeing the boys
communing together in violation of the rules made and provided for
school discipline, he promptly and sharply recalled them to the
subjects wisely laid down in the curriculum. Notwithstanding this
early discouragement, the youthful poet, abetted by his faithful
fellow song-bird, persevered in his erratic way, and Charleston had
the honor of being the home of one who has been regarded as the most
brilliant of Southern poets.

When Henry Timrod finished his course of study in the chilling
atmosphere in which his poetic ambition first essayed to put forth its
tender leaflets, he entered Franklin College, in Athens, the nucleus
of what is now the University of Georgia. A few years ago a visitor
saw his name in pencil on a wall of the old college. The "Toombs oak"
still stood on the college grounds, and it may be that its whispering
leaves brought to the youthful poet messages of patriotism which they
had garnered from the lips of the embryonic Georgia politician. Timrod
spent only a year in the college, quitting his studies partly because
his health failed, and partly because the family purse was not equal
to his scholastic ambition.

Returning to Charleston at a time when that city cherished the
ambition to become to the South what Boston was to the North, he
helped form the coterie of writers who followed the leadership of that
burly and sometimes burry old Mentor, William Gilmore Simms. The young
poet seems not to have been among the docile members of the flock, for
when Timrod's first volume of poems was published Hayne wrote to
Simms, requesting him to write a notice of Timrod's work, not that he
(Timrod) deserved it of Simms, but that he (Hayne) asked it of him. It
may be that Timrod's recognition of the fact that he could write
poetry and that Simms could only try to write it led to a degree of
youthful assumption which clashed with the dignity of the older man.
The Nestor of Southern literature seems not to have cherished
animosity, for he not only noticed Timrod favorably, but in after
years, when the poet's misfortunes pressed most heavily upon him, made
every possible exertion to give him practical and much needed
assistance.

Upon his return from college, Timrod, with some dim fancies concerning
a forensic career ci