Of the three poets, Lanier, Timrod, and Hayne, Lanier was by far the greatest, and has even become, in a small way, the centre of a cult; but his voice, while often pure and sweet, lacks the strength needed to carry it down the ages. He is like a little brook making beautiful some meadow or strip of woodland; but only mighty rivers reach the ocean. Lanier is memorable not so much for his work as for the gallant fight he made against the consumption which he had contracted as the result of exposure in the Confederate army during the Civil War. The war also played a disastrous part in the lives of both Hayne and Timrod, for it impoverished both of them, and did much to hasten the latter's death. Timrod, too, rose occasionally to noble utterance, but his voice is fainter and his talent more slender than Lanier's. His life was a painful one, marred by poverty and disease, and he died at the age of thirty-eight. Hayne's work is even less important, for he did not, like Timrod and Lanier, touch an occasional height of inspired utterance. His name is cherished in his native state of South Carolina, and in Georgia, where his last years were spent; but his poems are little read elsewhere. Timrod and Hayne were both born at Charleston, South Carolina, as was a third poet and novelist, who, in his day, loomed far larger than either of them, but who is now almost forgotten, except by students of American literature--William Gilmore Simms. Few American writers have produced so much--eighteen volumes of verse, three dramas, thirty-five novels and volumes of short stories, and about as many more books of history, biography and miscellany--and none, of like prominence in his day, has dropped more completely out of sight. In common with the other Southern writers we have mentioned, Simms lacked self-restraint and the power of self-criticism. Genius has been defined as the capacity for taking pains; and perhaps it is because Southern writers have lacked this capacity that none of them has proved to be a genius. Elbert Hubbard says that Simms "courted oblivion--and won her" by returning to the South after having achieved some success in the North; but it is doubtful if this had anything to do with it. The truth is that Simms's work has lost its appeal because of its inherent defects, and there is no chance that its popularity will ever be regained. And yet, while his verse is negligible--although he always thought himself a greater poet than novelist--some of his tales of the Carolinas and the Southwest possess a rude power and interest deserving of a better fate. Certainly Simms seems to have been the best imaginative writer the antebellum South produced.