Great political revolutions are the results or causes of literary schools; and the future student of our literature will note with more emphasis than we, that one of the incidents or results of the war between the sections was the birth of a new school of writers whose works are distinctively original and distinctively American. To this class, who have won, and are winning, fame for themselves while conferring it upon their country, belongs Col. Hay. His earlier writings have the characteristics of freshness, vigor and intensity which indicate an absence of the literary vassalage that dwarfed the growth and conventionalized or anglicized American writers as a class. Travel and indwelling among the shrines of the Old World’s literary gods and goddesses, have not un-Americanized either the man or the author. The facile transition from “Jim Bludso” to “A Woman’s Love” is paralleled by that from a bull-fight to a Bourbon duel. Though not at all ubiquitous, Col. Hay is a man of many homes,--that of his birth, Indiana; that of his Alma Mater, “Brown,” whose memory he has gracefully and affectionately embalmed in verse; that of his Mother-in-Law, Illinois, having been admitted to her bar in 1861. This great year--1861--the pivot upon which turned so many destinies,--saw him “at home” in the White House. Next to his own individual claims upon national recognition, his relations to the martyred President, the well-known confidence, esteem and affection which that great guider of national destiny felt for his youthful secretary, have rendered his name as familiar as a household word. At home in the tented fields of the Civil War, at home in the diplomatic circles of Paris, Vienna, and Madrid, Col. Hay, after an exceptionally varied experience, planted his first vine and fig-tree in Cleveland, Ohio, and his second in the City of Washington. Between these two homes he vibrates. The summer finds him in his Euclid Avenue house, which occupies the site where that of Susan Coolidge once stood. Around its far-reaching courtyard and uncramped, unfenced spaciousness, she moved--that happiest of beings, one endeared to little stranger hearts all over the land.