The year 1866 saw the low-water mark, perhaps, not only of the American novel, but of American literature generally. On May 12 of this year _The Round Table_ of New York, in an editorial entitled "Plain Talk with American Writers," declared that "The literary field was never so barren, never so utterly without hope of life.... The era of genius and vigor that seemed ready to burst on us only a few months ago has not been fulfilled. There is a lack of boldness and power. Men do not seem to strike out in new paths as bravely as of old." Then it issued a challenge to the new generation of literary men: "We have very little strong, original writing. Who will awaken us from this sleep? Who will first show us the first signs of a genuine literary reviving?... If ever there was a time when a magnificent field opened for young aspirants for literary renown, that time is the present. Every door is wide open." We know now that the reviving was close at hand. Within five years the flood-gates were opened, and Clemens, Harte, Hay, Burroughs, Howells, Miller, and all the group were publishing their first work. Among others a young Georgia school-teacher felt the thrill as he read the _Round Table_ call, and he made haste to send to the paper a budget of poems--"Barnacles," "Laughter in the Senate," and some others, to be, if possible, the first fruits of this new period. A year later, in 1867, he went himself to New York to bring out a novel, _Tiger Lilies_, a book sent forth with eagerness and infinite hope, for was not every door wide open? It is a book to linger over: crude as it is, it was the first real voice from the new South. I The little group of Southern poets that had gathered itself about Paul Hamilton Hayne (1831-1886), the chief of whom were Margaret Junkin Preston (1820-1897), Francis Orrery Ticknor (1822-1874), and Henry Timrod (1829-1867)--poets who were contemporary with Bayard Taylor and his group--belongs rather with the period before the war than with the new national period that followed it. They were poets of beauty like Stoddard, singing the music of Keats and Tennyson and the old Cavalier poets--dreamers, makers of dainty conceits and pretty similes, full of grace and often of real melody, but with little originality either of manner or message. The war came into their lives sharply and suddenly, a cataclysm that shook all their plans into ruins about them. It swept away their property, their homes, their libraries, even their health. For a time during the conflict they turned their poetry into martial channels: invectives on the invading "Huns," rallying songs, battle lyrics, patriotic calls. When the war was over they found themselves powerless to adjust themselves. Hayne before the war was a graceful sonneteer, a worshiper of classic beauty, a writer of odes, not to the nightingale but to the mocking bird: