The Southern States, before the Civil War and for a little time after, were not largely represented in American letters. In prose they had a fluent romancer, Simms, who wrote somewhat in the manner of Cooper, but with less skill and force; an exquisite artist of the short-story and the lyric, Poe, who, although he was born in Boston and did most of his work in Philadelphia and New York, may perhaps be counted sympathetically with the South; two agreeable story-tellers, John Esten Cooke and John P. Kennedy; two delicate and charming lyrists, Paul Hayne and Henry Timrod; and one greatly gifted poet, Sidney Lanier, whose career was cut short by a premature death. But the distinctive spirit of the South did not really find an adequate utterance in early American literature, and it is only of late years that it is beginning to do so. The fine and memorable stories of George W. Cable reflect the poesy and romance of the creole life in Louisiana. James Lane Allen and Thomas Nelson Page express in their prose the Southern atmosphere and temperament. The poems of Madison Cawein are full of the bloom and fragrance of Kentucky. Among the women who write, Alice Hegan Rice, "Charles Egbert Craddock," Ruth McEnery Stuart, "George Madden Martin," and Mary Johnston may be named as charming story-tellers of the South. Joel Chandler Harris has made the old negro folk-tales classic, in his _Uncle Remus_,--a work which belongs, if I mistake not, to one of the most enduring types of literature. But beyond a doubt the richest and finest flowering of _belles lettres_ in the United States during the nineteenth century was that which has been called "the Renaissance of New England." The quickening of moral and intellectual life which followed the Unitarian movement in theology, the antislavery agitation in society, and the transcendental fermentation in philosophy may not have caused, but it certainly influenced, the development of a group of writers, just before the middle of the century, who brought a deeper and fuller note into American poetry and prose.