_The Forerunners._--Early and minor poets in the South need not long detain us. William Crafts (1789-1826), of Charleston, South Carolina, a graduate of Harvard, and an orator of repute, composed a “Raciad,” or epic on horse-racing, and “Sullivan’s Island.” His “Miscellaneous Writings” (1828) were published posthumously. William J. Grayson (1788-1863), who was more voluminous, attempted in his poem “The Hireling and the Slave” (1856) to represent slavery as a preferable state for the negro. Richard H. Wilde (1789-1847), Edward C. Pinkney (1802-28), George H. Calvert (1803-89), Philip P. Cooke (1816-50) and others, show a range of imitation running all the way from Byron through Scott and Moore to Tennyson. Cooke’s “Florence Vane” was warmly admired by Poe. Albert Pike (1809-91), should be remembered as the author of “Dixie,” which, “set to a popular air which has been traced back to slavery times in New York State, became, in a multitude of variations, a Southern Marseillaise” (Onderdonk). _Timrod_, _Hayne_, _and Simms_.--Of a high order was the poetry of that champion of the Southern cause Henry B. Timrod (1829-67). Denied by fortune the sort of education that he craved, striving throughout much of his life with poverty and sickness, and finally defeated, saddened by personal bereavement as well as by the downfall of the South, Timrod died before he could make adequate report of his endowments. His volume of “Poems” (1860), issued at the beginning of the Civil War, was almost unnoticed; and even yet he has not obtained the recognition due him. His devotion to the South was not greater than his reverence for his art. Few of our poets have so clearly understood themselves and their craft. Unusual courage breathes in all he wrote. In the year of his death, a prey to disease and sorrow, he could say to the Confederate soldiers buried “At Magnolia Cemetery”: Sleep sweetly in your humble graves, Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause; Though yet no marble column craves The pilgrim here to pause. In seeds of laurel in the earth The blossom of your fame is blown, And somewhere, waiting for its birth, The shaft is in the stone.