_Minor Poets of New England._--Among the minor New England poets who came slightly later, was Samuel Longfellow (1819-92)--younger brother of Henry W. Longfellow--a hymn-writer of singular purity. Sylvester Judd (1813-53), a Unitarian minister, wrote an epic entitled “Philo” (1850). William Wetmore Story (1819-95), who edited the life and letters of his distinguished father, Chief Justice Story, forsook the bar at an early age and went to Italy to engage in sculpture. He was a poet of refinement, touched with melancholy, intellectual rather than passionate--yet with a fondness for the intangible--influenced by Longfellow and Holmes, by Tennyson and Browning. In verse, his chief works were “Poems” (1847), “Graffiti d’Italia” (1868), “A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem” (1870), “He and She” (1883), and “Poems” (1886). Among his individual pieces “Cleopatra” seems to be the best known. Theophilus W. Parsons (1819-92) shows a similar Continental influence, whose most valuable result was his free translation of Dante’s “Inferno” (cantos I-X, 1843, completed in 1867); this was preceded by his fine lines “On a Bust of Dante” (1841), which are justly admired. Henry H. Brownell (1820-72) attracted notice by a poem on Farragut, and through Farragut’s good offices entered the United States Navy. His “War Lyrics and Other Poems” (1866) contained a stirring piece, “The River Fight,” on the exploits of Farragut, somewhat in the style of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” =Poetry in the South.=--The major poets of New England, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Emerson, and perhaps one or two others, constitute the one group in America that may rightfully be dignified with the name of school. Before approaching them, however, let us give some consideration to the poets of the South. Though the institution of slavery gave the dominant classes in the Southern States a leisure comparable to that enjoyed by classic Greece, plantation life was not favourable to a thorough and imaginative education; nor were there great civic centres to collect, for mutual inspiration, such individuals as showed artistic and literary bent. Furthermore, in modern times most of the poets have been furnished by a restless and aspiring middle class, which was virtually lacking in the South. Among the owners of plantations, personal ambition rarely soared much higher than local, state, or sectional politics, and political and occasional oratory, with some noteworthy exceptions, was flamboyant and insincere. Save for a few noteworthy exceptions, accordingly, the career of poet languished, and literature of a high order failed of appreciation. The leading poets of the South realised only too well the weight of inertia against which they strove, in a civilisation where the odds were continually against their success.