poems is prefaced with this sentence: "These poems are republished with no ill-feeling, nor with the desire to revive

HAYNE SIDE OF THE COLE MONUMENT, AUGUSTA, GEORGIA. The other sides are memorials to three other Southern poets - Father Abram J. Ryan, Sidney Lanier, and James R. Randall.

old issues; but only as a record and a sacred duty." Our Martyrs closes with these words:

"Oh, Thou! that hast charms of healing,

Descend on a widowed land,

And bind o'er the wounds of feeling,

The balms of thy mystic hand;

Till the lives that lament and languish,

Renewed by a touch divine,

From the depths of their mortal anguish,

May rise to the calm of Thine."

is in the same tone:

"Let every sacred fane

Call its sad votaries to the throne of God,

And, with the cloister and the tented sod,
Join in one solemn strain !

*

Peace on the whirring marts,

Peace where the scholar thinks, the hunter roams,
Peace, God of Peace! peace, peace, in all our homes,
And peace in all our hearts ! "

Poets of Nature.Besides being remembered for their war poems, Timrod and Hayne take high rank as writers of nature lyrics, in which the woodland sights and sounds of the South receive worthy praise. Professor Wendell puts Timrod's Cotton Boll in the same class with Whittier's poems on New England landscapes; and Colonel Higginson thinks Hayne has a "softer, richer, sweeter" note than Bryant. It has been said of Timrod's work in this field:

nourished and refreshed by her always, he never wrote a

line of merely descriptive poetry. Nature is only the symbol, the image, to interpret his spiritual meaning." He believes as strongly as does Wordsworth in a sort of conscious existence in natural objects; note, for example, the opening stanza of Flower-Life:

"I think that, next to your sweet eyes,
And pleasant books, and starry skies,
I love the world of flowers;
Less for their beauty of a day,
Than for the tender things they say,
And for a creed I've held alway,
That they are sentient powers."

The Cotton Boll, The Lily Confidante, and The Rosebuds are among the most charming of Timrod's poems that give concrete evidence of this belief. Hayne's most striking poems of nature are a number dealing with the pines, which he sang as enthusiastically as Lanier sang the marshes. While flowers and simple things appeal to him at times, he has a constant feeling of devotion to the "majestic pine," the "monarchal pine," the "sacred tree," the "foliaged giants." Every pine has for him a Dryad, an indwelling spirit, which in a beautiful sonnet, The Axe and the Pine, he represents as wailing in distress when the tree is hewn down. In The Dryad of the Pine he shows that he holds a creed similar to Timrod's in Flower-Life:

"Here lingering long, amid the shadowy gleams,
Faintly I catch (yet scarce as one that dreams)

Low words of alien music, softly sung,

And rhythmic sighs in some sweet unknown tongue.

"And something rare I cannot clasp or see,
Flits vaguely out from this mysterious tree
A viewless glory, an ethereal grace,

Which make Elysian all the haunted place!"

The poems of Timrod and Hayne have been received as enthusiastically by Northern critics as by Southern. Even their fieriest lyrics of the war aroused no antagonisms, and their songs of Southern flowers, trees, streams, and woods are universally admired. Both men fall short of the genius of Poe, and in both we occasionally catch strains that seem to have been influenced by Tennyson, Keats, and Wordsworth. But they were genuine poets, with a high conceptior of the poet's mission as prophet and teacher; and they hold a high place in our country's verse a place we may be sure is permanent, and tending higher every day.

HISTORY WRITING IN AMERICA

Early American Chroniclers. Not until the second quarter of the nineteenth century was any historical work produced in America which has much merit as literature. The works of Smith, Strachey, Bradford, Winthrop, and Mather have been shown to possess little merit beyond record of contemporary events. Thomas Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts, Professor Wendell thinks " may perhaps be called the most respectable American book before the Revolution”; but even Hutchinson was not a man of letters. Besides their value as narratives of a highly important period in our history, these books also deserve to be remembered as evidence of the interest in great movements which produced some really notable historical writers in the period now under consideration.

Four Great Historians. The four men who may be called the founders of historical study in America - George Bancroft, William Hickling Prescott, John Lothrop Motley, and Francis Parkman. were all natives of Massachusetts and graduates of Harvard. Bancroft spent half a century on his History of the United States; Prescott and Parkman

concerned themselves with themes drawn from North America but not coming down to the time of American independence; while Motley produced a history which required residence abroad to secure material, and which is related to American life only through the spirit behind the movement treated in its pages. The breadth of view indicated by this

choice of subjects is another sign of the Romantic influence already referred to as dominant in England at this time. We have space to discuss in detail only one of the historians, and choose Motley as being on the whole the best entitled to a position in literature, though many would make that claim for Parkman.