His poetic experiments of this period one may find at the back of the definitive edition of his work. With Timrod and Hayne he was still dreamy and imaginative, more prone to look at the beautiful than at the harsher realities of humanity, yet even as he was dreaming over his "Jacquerie" he was not oblivious to the problems of his own time. He wrote dialect poems: "Jones's Private Argument," "Thar's More in the Man than Thar Is in the Land," "Nine from Eight," and the like, and published them in Southern papers. They deal with the Georgia "Crackers" and with the social and financial conditions of the times, and they were written in 1868, two years before the Pike County balladry. In 1875 with his brother Clifford he published in _Scribner's Monthly_ "The Power of Prayer; or, the First Steamboat up the Alabama," a negro dialect poem adapted undoubtedly from a similar episode recounted in Mark Twain's _The Gilded Age_, yet original in tone and realistically true. Had it been unsigned we should attribute it without hesitation to Irwin Russell, who by many is believed to have been the first to discover the literary possibilities of the negro, at least in the field of poetic balladry. How like Russell is a stanza like this: It 'pear to me dis mornin' I kin smell de fust o' June. I 'clar', I b'lieve dat mockin'-bird could play de fiddle soon! Dem yonder town-bells sounds like dey was ringin' in de moon. But Russell's first poem, "Uncle Cap Interviewed," appeared in _Scribner's_ almost a year later. The Lanier brothers contributed to the magazine at least one more dialect poem, "Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn," a product as realistically true to the negro as anything written later by Harris or Page: Sin's rooster's crowed, Ole Mahster's riz, De sleepin'-time is pas'; Wake up dem lazy Baptissis, _Chorus._ _Dey's mightily in de grass, grass, Dey's mightily in de grass._ De Meth'dis team's done hitched; O fool, De day's a-breakin' fas'; Gear up dat lean old Baptis' mule, _Dey's mightily in de grass, grass, Dey's mightily in de grass._ Etc. Lanier was a pioneer in a rich field. IV