Of the great writers and orators who left their impress upon us in the last years of the Old South, I can speak from personal contact and experience, and with thankfulness that as a boy I was given to see most of them face to face and to touch, in spirit, the hem of their garments. The spell of the genius of Edgar Allan Poe, though the fitful fever of his life had ended, was upon the literature and literary men of the time. The weird beauty of the lines of this prince of the powers of harmony, contrasting so wonderfully with a strange analytical power that made him at once a foremost prose and poetical writer of his century, had set before us the measure of beauty and the test of genius. Then, in our own day, came Paul Hamilton Hayne, Henry Timrod, and Sidney Lanier. I cannot describe to you the feeling of ownership that we of the Old South felt in this trinity of noble singers; nor can I express the sense of tenderness that comes to me as I recall the pain and poverty that haunted them most of their days until the end came, to two of them at least, in utter destitution. It was my privilege early in life to fall under the spell of the minstrelsy of these three men. As long as the red hills of Georgia stand, and its overhanging pines are stirred by the south wind’s sighing, let it recall to the honorable and grateful remembrance of Georgians the gentle yet proud-spirited poet who, having lost all but honor and genius in his native sea-girt city, came to his rude cabin home at Copse Hill as the weary pilgrim of whom he so tenderly sings: With broken staff and tattered shoon, I wander slow from dawn to noon— From arid noon till, dew-impearled, Pale twilight steals across the world. Yet sometimes through dim evening calms I catch the gleam of distant palms; And hear, far off, a mystic sea, Divine as waves on Galilee. Perchance through paths unknown, forlorn, I still may reach an Orient morn; To rest where Easter breezes stir Around the sacred sepulcher. I know what a fashion it is to worship at the shrines of the “Lake poets,” and how Wordsworth and Burns and Shelley and like singers of the Old World, with Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell of the New, are set on high as the greater masters of poesy. But if genius is a thing of quality rather than quantity, I go back to the dark days and memories of battle and take my stand lovingly beside the new-made grave of Timrod, the poet laureate of the Confederacy, and call to mind what I believe to be a poem that the greatest of English and American poets would be glad to claim as their own. Remember, as you read it, how in his dire want the poet wrote of the little book of which it is a part: “I would consign every line of it to oblivion for one hundred dollars in hand.” Spring, with that nameless pathos in the air Which dwells with all things fair; Spring, with her golden suns and silver rains, Is with us once again.