One may trace these elements--the Longstreet realism at the one extreme and the Macon College influence at the other--in all the later Georgia writers. We have found how Lanier in his earlier work alternated between broad cracker sketches and dialect ballads and the more elegant forms of prose and poetry. Even a poem as rhapsodic as his "Corn" contains within it a realistic picture of the thriftless Georgia planter. It was from the blending of these two streams of influence that there came some of the strongest literature of the new period. II The link between Longstreet and the younger Georgia writers is to be found in Richard Malcolm Johnston. Chronologically--he was born in 1822--he belongs to the earlier group, the generation of Lowell and Story, Boker and Read and Edward Everett Hale, and he seems to have been touched not at all by the literary influences that had so strongly exerted themselves upon the writers of the seventies. He was reared on a central Georgia plantation with all the surroundings of the old régime; he had been educated in the type of rural school so graphically described in his earlier sketches and then later at Mercer College, from which he was graduated in 1841; he gave the vigorous years of his life to the law and then to teaching; and after he was sixty years of age began seriously to devote himself to the profession of literature. As early as 1857 he had begun writing sketches of provincial life after the Longstreet pattern. His first piece, "The Goose Pond School" was followed at long intervals by others in the same vein, written, the greater part of them, after his removal to Baltimore partly to assist his friend Turnbull, the editor of the _Southern Magazine_, who had asked for his help, and partly "to subdue as far as possible the feeling of homesickness for my native region. It never occurred to me that they were of any sort of value. Yet when a collection of them, nine in all, was printed by Mr. Turnbull, who about that time ended publication of his magazine, and when a copy of this collection fell into the hands of Henry M. Alden, of _Harper's Magazine_, whose acquaintance I had lately made, he expressed much surprise that I had not received any pecuniary compensation, and added that he would have readily accepted them if they had been offered to him. Several things he said about them that surprised and gratified me much. I then set into the pursuit of that kind of work."[136]