His verse often shows exactness of observation, characteristic of modern students of nature, as well as a romantic love of the outdoor world. Note the specific references to the shape and color of individual natural objects in these lines from Cawein:-- "May-apples, ripening yellow, lean With oblong fruit, a lemon-green, Near Indian-turnips, long of stem, That bear an acorn-oval gem." He loves the nymphs of mythology, the dryads, naiads, and the fairies. One of his poems is called _There Are Fairies_:-- "There are fairies, I could swear I have seen them busy where Rose-leaves loose their scented hair, * * * * * Leaning from the window sill Of a rose or daffodil, Listening to their serenade, All of cricket music made." In luxuriance of imagery and profuse appeal to the senses, he is the Keats of the South. Lines like these remind us of the greater poet's _The Eve of St. Agnes_:-- "Into the sunset's turquoise marge The moon dips, like a pearly barge Enchantment sails through magic seas To fairyland Hesperides." Keats exclaims:-- "O for a beaker full of the warm South." Cawein proceeds to fill the beaker from the summer of a southern land, where "The west was hot geranium-red," where "The dawn is a warp of fever, The eve is a woof of fire," and where "The heliotropes breathe drowsy musk Into the jasmine-dreamy air." Cawein sometimes suffers from profuseness and lack of pruning, but the music, sentiment, imaginative warmth, and profusion of nature's charms in his best lyrics rouse keen delight in any lover of poetry. While he revels in the color, warmth, and joys of nature, it should also be observed that he can occasionally strike that deeper note which characterizes the great nature poets of the English race. In _A Prayer for Old Age_, he asks:-- "Never to lose my faith in Nature, God: But still to find Worship in trees; religion in each sod; And in the wind that breathe the universal God." SUMMARY The lack of towns, the widely separated population, the aristocratic nature of the civilization depending on slave labor, the absorption of the people in political questions, especially the question of slavery, the attitude toward literature as a profession, the poverty of public education, the extreme conservatism and isolation of the South, and, finally, the Civil War, and the period of reconstruction after it,--were all influences that served to retard the development of literature in the South.