Poets of the South | Page 3

and to sing a new loyalty to our great Republic.
The South has not been as unfruitful in literature as is often supposed.
While there have been very few to make literature a vocation, a
surprisingly large number have made it an avocation. Law and
literature, as we shall have occasion to note, have frequently gone hand
in hand. A recent work on Southern literature [*] enumerates more than

twelve hundred writers, most of whom have published one or more
volumes. There are more than two hundred poets who have been
thought worthy of mention. More than fifty poets have been credited to
Virginia alone; and an examination of their works reveals, among a
good deal that is commonplace and imitative, many a little gem that
ought to be preserved. Apart from the five major poets of the
South--Poe, Hayne, Timrod, Lanier, and Ryan--who are reserved for
special study, we shall now consider a few of the minor poets who have
produced verse of excellent quality. [Footnote *: Manly's Southern
Literature.]
FRANCIS SCOTT KEY (1780-1843) is known throughout the land as
the author of The Star-spangled Banner, the noblest, perhaps, of our
patriotic hymns. He was born in Frederick County, Maryland, and was
educated at St. John's College, Annapolis. He studied law, and after
practicing with success in Frederick City, he removed to Washington,
where he became district attorney.
During the bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812, he was
detained on board a British vessel, whither he had gone to secure the
release of a friend. All night long he watched the bombardment with
the keenest anxiety. In the morning, when the dawn disclosed the
starspangled banner still proudly waving over the fort, he conceived the
stirring song, which at once became popular and was sung all over the
country. Though a volume of his poems, with a sketch by Chief-Justice
Taney, was published in 1857, it is to The Star-spangled Banner that he
owes his literary fame.
"O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we
hailed at the twilight's last gleaming, Whose broad stripes and bright
stars through the perilous fight O'er the ramparts we watched, were so
gallantly streaming?
"And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof
through the night that our flag was still there. O say, does that
star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home
of the brave?"

Few poems written in the South have been more popular than _My Life
is like the Summer Rose_. It has the distinction of having been praised
by Byron. Its author, RICHARD HENRY WILDE (1789-1847), was
born in Dublin, Ireland, but brought up and educated in Augusta,
Georgia. He studied law, became attorney general of his adopted state,
and later entered Congress, where he served for several terms. He was a
man of scholarly tastes and poetic gifts. He spent five years abroad,
chiefly in Italy, where his studies in Italian literature afterwards led to a
work on Torquato Tasso. It was on the occasion of this trip abroad that
he wrote A Farewell to America, which breathes a noble spirit of
patriotism:--
"Farewell, my more than fatherland!
Home of my heart and friends, adieu!
Lingering beside some foreign
strand,
How oft shall I remember you!
How often, o'er the waters blue,

Send back a sigh to those I leave,
The loving and beloved few,
Who
grieve for me,--for whom I grieve!"
On his return to America, he settled in New Orleans, where he became
a professor of law in the University of Louisiana. Though the author of
a volume of poems of more than usual excellence, it is the melancholy
lyric, My Life is like the Summer Rose, that, more than all the rest, has
given him a niche in the temple of literary fame. Is it necessary to quote
a stanza of a poem so well known?
"My life is like the summer rose,
That opens to the morning sky,

But, ere the shades of evening close,
Is scattered on the ground--to
die!
Yet on the rose's humble bed
The sweetest dews of night are
shed,
As if she wept the waste to see--
But none shall weep a tear
for me!"
GEORGE D. PRENTICE (1802-1870) was a native of Connecticut. He
was educated at Brown University, and studied law; but he soon gave
up his profession for the more congenial pursuit of literature. In 1828

he established at Hartford the New England Weekly Review, in which a
number of his poems, serious and sentimental, appeared. Two years
later, at the age of twenty-eight, he turned over his paper to Whittier
and removed to Louisville, where he became editor of the Journal.
He was a man of brilliant intellect, and soon made his paper a power in
education, society, and politics. Apart from his own vigorous