II When we come to study the individual poets of this period, we find a fair general level of verse, with several instances of really noble work. As in previous eras, the love of the lyric is in evidence, and in this department there is no small amount of sweetness, harmony, and technical skill. But the deeper philosophies of life are handled perhaps a little more often; greater sincerity seems present; and, although the power of sustained effort belongs to but few, there is in other ways a marked improvement. One of the early lyric writers was ALEXANDER BEAUFORT MEEK (1814-1865). While a small boy he removed from his birthplace, Columbia, South Carolina, to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and there in the University of Alabama and, later, in the University of Georgia, he received (1814-1865) his general and law education. Of Alexander course, as a Southern lawyer, he entered politics, and held various important positions, among them being that of Assistant-Secretary of Treasury (1845). He found time, however, like many another Southern lawyer and politician, to become an amateur in literature and to serve as editor of such important papers as The Tuscaloosa Flag of the Union, The Southron, and The Mobile Register. His verses appeared frequently in Southern papers and magazines, and when they were collected in Red Eagle (1855) and Songs and Poems of the South (1857), they received enthusiastic notice. Meek was a writer of some sweetness and no little vigor. In all of his poems there is good lyric quality. For instance, in this last stanza of The Mocking Bird, there is some true harmony, and besides, there is a certain lightness that is not without charm: "Bird of music, wit, and gladness, Would thine art were in my rhymes. Sweeter sounds were never heard! Mime and minstrel-Mocking Bird." Much of his work is of this character and quality. Take, again, A Song; here we have real lyric freedom-the spontaneity of expression, the happiness of sentiment that make a true melody: "The blue-bird is whistling in Hillibee grove,— Terra-re! Terra-re! His mate is repeating the tale of his love,— Terra-re! Terra-re! But never that song, As its notes float along, So sweet and so soft in its raptures can be, As thy low whispered words, young chieftain, to me." But it has been mentioned that melody and pleasing sentiment alone do not make a great poet. Living thought, passionate questionings, dramatic force, and deep emotional power have been and ever will be requisites. These Meek did not possess. As was the case of others to be discussed, he was an amateur in poetry, a man who expressed a few sentiments in delicate, pleasing fabrics. III Theodore Again we come to a man made famous by one production-THEODORE O'HARA (1820-1867)', author of The Bivouac of the Dead. He was born at Danville, Kentucky, and received his education, both academic and law, in that town. In his (1820-1867) twenty-fifth year he secured a clerkship in the Treasury Department at Washington; but he gave this up to enter the Mexican War. For a time he practised law at Washington, then began newspaper work, serving as editor of The Mobile Register and The Frankfort Yeoman, and at the opening of the Civil War, entered the Confederate army and at its close came out ranking as a colonel, but absolutely penniless. His remaining years were spent as a cotton buyer in Georgia and Alabama. He was buried first in Georgia, but by a special act of the Kentucky legislature, his body was taken to Frankfort and buried among the heroes of Buena Vista. Now, as both soldier and poet, he deserved this honor. For, besides having served with these dead, he wrote his one worthy poem on the occasion of their burial at Frankfort. Some lines of The Bivouac of the Dead are today more familiar to many Americans than quotations from far greater poets. The opening words of the verses have been heard on many a public occasion: "The muffled drum's sad roll has beat No more on Life's parade shall meet And as one walks through some of the great national cemeteries, where rows upon rows of graves stretch before the eye, the appropriateness of some portions is striking. "On Fame's eternal camping ground And glory guards, with solemn round, And again: "Nor war's wild note nor glory's peal Those breasts that never more may feel The rapture of the fight." The poem has been most fortunate in its setting, its environment, and the mood of its readers. Seen, as it almost always is, amid the silence and gloom of these vast burial grounds of heroes, it has a strange effect on the already saddened hearts of its readers. Certainly not in American Literature and perhaps not in any other literature is there such another poem, holding its own against time, through the help of the dead. Margaret IV. During the same years that Augusta Evans Wilson and other women of the South were gaining much attention as novelists, a woman, named MARGARET PRESTON, the wife of a Virginia professor, was producing a poetry which was in that time (1820-1897) and is today considered of an exceedingly high degree of excellence. Margaret Preston (1820-1897) was the daughter of Dr. Junkin, founder of Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, and was born at Philadelphia. During her twenty-eighth year her father became president of Washington and Lee College, and from that time forth she resided in Virginia and her main interests were centered in the South. She married Colonel J. T. L. Preston, a professor in the Virginia Military Institute, at Lexington, where most of her literary work was done. She was a rather quiet woman, but her intellectual attainments were brilliant. One of her earliest memories, she declared, was standing at her father's knee, when only a little one three years old, learning the Hebrew alphabet. At ten she was reading difficult Latin; at twelve she had made good progress in Greek. Her range of reading in English was exceedingly wide and careful, a fact that is evidenced in the influence of English poets upon her work and also in that polish of expression which only association with the best in literature can give. Her first volume was a novel, Silverwood-A Book of Memories (1856). It was a quiet, simple story, rather sad in its general tone, and distinctly Southern in its scenes and trend of thought. Although good, it was not excellent; and its popularity was rather limited. In her second volume Mrs. Preston found that the sphere of her work was poetry. Beechenbrook; A Rhyme of the War, written in the midst of the strife, and published in 1866, was undoubtedly the most popular poem in the South during the entire war decade. In those days it received a welcome rarely accorded to American verse. It is a long poem, covering sixty or seventy closely printed pages, and, as the title indicates, is a narrative of the great struggle. Here we have a description of that life of agonizing suspense led by many a soldier's wife. There is in it, to quote from the volume itself, "The clangour of muskets, the flashing of steel, But ever present amidst this show and flourish of |