From 1850 the natural course of events in the South began to develop literary centers, of which Charleston, South Carolina, was the most notable. At this date William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) was in the high prime of life and was the unchallenged leader by virtue of age, literary achievement, and force of personality. He had appeared before the public with two volumes of poems in 1827, without foregoing poetry had gone on to prolific writing of adventure stories, and had produced at the rate of more than a book a year. He was an aboundingly vigorous, somewhat turbulent man, with a stimulating gift for talk and a very generous interest in all men of literary feeling and especially in younger aspirants. Around him and John Russell, the bookseller, there gathered by social gravitation a group who became for Charleston what the frequenters of the Old Corner Book Store were to Boston and rather more than what the "Bohemians" of Pfaff's restaurant were to New York. Russell's became a rendezvous for the best people during the daytimes--perhaps to buy, perhaps only to talk--and in the evenings the men gathered in the spirit of a literary club, though without organization or name. _Russell's Magazine_ was the natural fruit of the group-spirit thus engendered, just as the _Atlantic Monthly_ (see p. 288) was of similar associations in Boston or as the _Dial_ had been of the Transcendental Club in 1840 (see p. 195). It was a further consequence of this plowing of the cultural soil that two Charleston boys born in 1829 and 1830 were encouraged as young men not only to write but to publish their poems and that one became the first editor and the other a frequent contributor to the local periodical. These were Henry Timrod and Paul Hamilton Hayne. Of the two friends, somewhat as in the case of Halleck and Drake, Timrod, the one who showed promise of finer things, was the victim of an early death. As a youth he was given to the introspective seriousness and the grave extravagances of the growing poet--characteristics which are not wholly sacrificed in the grown poet, as they are in the average "sensible" man. His inclination to extol emotion as an end in itself, however, was fostered by a native hospitality toward sentimentalism for which there was little to correspond in the more prosaic North. In fact "the susceptibility of early feeling" which Irving wished to keep alive (see p. 126) and which was the central thread in Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" was, and still is, a cue to certain prevailing Southern traits. Whatever may have been the origin of Southern speech and manners, they have continued in some measure to resemble those which we associate with English literature of the mid-eighteenth century. Both have a touch of courtly formality, a tendency toward the oratorical style, an explicit insistence on honor and chivalry, a display of deference to womanhood and to all beauty, and both are in constant