No other Indianian has lived so faithfully as Maurice Thompson a life devoted to literary ideals, and none of his contemporaries among writers of the West and South has been more loyally devoted to pure _belles-lettres_ than he. Abstract beauty has appealed to him more strongly than to any other writer of the Indiana group, and he has expressed it in his poems, through media suggested by his own environment, with charm and grace. He is a native of Indiana, having been born at Fairfield, near Brookville, September 9, 1844. His father was of Scotch-Irish ancestry; his maternal grandfather was of Dutch origin; and both lines were represented in the Southwestern migration at the beginning of the century. In Maurice’s childhood his father, who was a Baptist clergyman, made several changes of residence, all tending southward, removing first to southeastern Missouri, then to Kentucky, and again within a few years to the valley of the Coosawattee in northern Georgia. Here the senior Thompson became a planter, and Maurice enjoyed thereafter, until he reached manhood, a life in which the study of books was ideally blended with the freedom of the country. He has always expressed great obligations to his mother’s influences during these years; her literary tastes were sound, and she imparted to her children the love of good books, overcoming by her own encouragement and guidance the absence of schools in their neighborhood. Tutors were procured for higher mathematics and the languages; but the chief impulse to the study of the old literatures lay in the youth’s own taste and temperament. Like Lanier, Hayne, Esten Cooke, John B. Tabb, and others who were to become known in literature, he entered the Confederate army (1862), and saw hard service until the surrender. Even these years of soldier experience did not interrupt wholly his studies, for he usually managed to carry with him some book worth reading, the essays of De Quincey and Carlyle belonging to this period. Mr. Thompson returned to his father’s plantation at the close of the war, and remained there for three years, continuing his studies as before, but substituting hard manual labor for the life of pleasant adventure by field and flood that had given him from boyhood into early manhood an intimate acquaintance with wild things. He now began, of necessity, to accommodate himself to the changed conditions of the community and of his own family. He had studied engineering, and he perfected himself in it, and read law. Reconstruction moved forward slowly, and wishing to get as quickly as possible into a region where his material prospects could be improved, he went to Crawfordsville, without fixed purpose, and found employment with a railway surveying party. He supported himself by engineering until he felt justified in taking up the law, in which he was successful, and to which he was constant until the increase of literary reputation and steady employment in more congenial labor made