Chapter V: Southern Literature (2)

The three books that contain the most remarkable of these tales are: _Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings_ (1880), _Nights with Uncle Remus_ (1881), _Uncle Remus and His Friends_ (1892). In the volume, _Told by Uncle Remus_ (1905), the same negro relates more stories to the son of the "little boy," who had many years before listened to the earlier tales. The one thing in these books that is absolutely the creation of Harris is the character of Uncle Remus. He is a patriarchal ex-slave, who seems to be a storehouse of knowledge concerning Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer B'ar, and indeed all the animals of those bygone days when animals talked and lived in houses. He understands child nature as well as he knows the animals, and from the corner of his eye he keeps a sharp watch upon his tiny auditor to see how the story affects him. No figure more living, original, and lovable than Uncle Remus appears in southern fiction. In him Harris has created, not a burlesque or a sentimental impossibility, but an imperishable type, the type of the true plantation negro.

Harris also writes entertainingly of the slaves and their masters on the plantation and of the poor free negroes, in such stories as _Mingo and Other Sketches_ (1884) and _Free Joe_ (1887). He further presents a vivid picture of the Georgia "crackers" and "moonshiners"; but his inimitable animal stories, and Uncle Remus who tells them, have overshadowed all his other work, and remain his most distinctive and original contribution to American literature. These tales bid fair to have something of the immortality of those myths which succeeding generations have for thousands of years enjoyed.

THOMAS NELSON PAGE, 1853-

Thomas Nelson Page was born on Oakland Plantation in Hanover County, Virginia, in 1853. He graduated at Washington and Lee University in 1872, and took a degree in law at the University of Virginia in 1874. He practiced law in Richmond, wrote stories and essays upon the old South, and later moved to Washington to live.

His best stories are the short ones, like _Marse Chan_ and _Meh Lady_, in which life on the Virginia plantations during the war is presented. Page is a natural story-teller. He wastes no time in analyzing, describing, and explaining, but sets his simple plots into immediate motion and makes us acquainted with his characters through their actions and speech. The regal mistresses of the plantations, the lordly but kind-hearted masters, the loving, simple-minded slaves, and handsome young men and maidens are far from complex personalities. They have a primitive simplicity and ingenuousness which belong to a bygone civilization. The strongest appeal in the stories is made by the negroes, whose faith in their masters is unquestioning, and sometimes pathetic.

Some old negro who had been a former slave usually tells the story, and paints his "marster," his "missus," and his "white folks," as the finest in the region. He looks back upon the bygone days as a time when "nuthin' warn too good for niggers," and is sure that if his young "marster" did not get the brush "twuz cause twuz a bob-tailed fox." In _Meh Lady_ the negro relating the tale is the true but unconscious hero. This kindly presentation of the finest traits of slave days, the idealizing of the characters, and the sympathetic portrayal of the warm affection existing between master and slave give to Page's books a strong note of romanticism. The humor is mild, quaint, and subtle, and it often lies next to tears. Page is preeminently a short-story writer. He possesses the restraint, the compression, the art, the unity of idea necessary to the production of a good short story.

GEORGE W. CABLE, 1844-

George Washington Cable is of Virginia and New England stock, but he was born in New Orleans in 1844, and called this beautiful city his home until 1884, when he moved to Connecticut. The following year he selected Northampton, Massachusetts, as a permanent residence. He was but fourteen when his father died, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. The boy thereupon left school and went to work. Four years later he entered the Confederate army. So youthful was his appearance, that a planter, catching sight of him, exclaimed, "Great heavens! Abe Lincoln told the truth. We _are_ robbing the cradle and the grave!" He served two years in the southern army, and after the war returned penniless to his native city. His efforts to find employment are described in his most realistic novel, _Dr. Sevier_. He was a surveyor, a clerk to cotton merchants, and a reporter on the New Orleans _Picayune_; but his tastes were literary, and after the publication in 1879 of a volume of short stories, _Old Creole Days_, his attention was turned wholly to literature.

Cable's _Old Creole Days_ is a collection of picturesque short stories of the romantic Creoles of New Orleans. _Jean-ah-Poquelin_, the story of an old recluse, is most artistically told. There are few incidents; Cable merely describes the former roving life of Jean, tells how suddenly it stopped, how he never again left the old home where he and an African mute lived, and how Jean's younger brother mysteriously disappeared, and the suspicion of his murder rested upon Jean's shoulders. The explanation of these points is unfolded by hints, conjectures, and rare glimpses into the Poquelin grounds at night, and finally by an impressive but simple description of Jean's funeral, at which the terrible secret is completely revealed. The deftest and finest touch of an artist is seen in the working out of this pathetic story.

_Madame Delphine_, now included in the volume _Old Creole Days_, is equally the product of a refined art. Here is shown the anguish of a quadroon mother who turns frantically from one to another for help to save her beautiful child, the ivory-tinted daughter of the South. When every one fails, the mother heart makes one grand sacrifice by which the end is gained, and she dies at the foot of the altar in an agony of remorse and love. The beautiful land of flowers, the jasmine-scented night of the South, the poetic chivalry of a proud, high-souled race are painted vividly in this idyllic story. Its people are not mortals, its beauty is not of earth, but, like the carved characters on Keats's Grecian urn, they have immortal youth and cannot change. Keats could have said to the lovers in _Madame Delphine_, as to his own upon the vase:--

"Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!"

Cable's best long works are _The Grandissimes_ (1880), _Dr. Sevier_ (1884), and _Bonaventure, a Prose Pastoral of Arcadian Louisiana_ (1888). Of these three, _The Grandissimes_ is easily first in merit. It is a highly romantic work, full of dramatic episodes, and replete with humor. The abundance and variety of interesting characters in this romance evidence the great fertility and power of invention possessed by Cable. First of all, there is the splendid Creole, Honore' Grandissime, the head of the family,--a man who sees far into the future, and places his trust in the young American republic. Combating the narrow prejudices of his family, he leads them in spite of themselves to riches and honor. Opposing him in family counsels is his uncle, Agricola Fusilier, the brave, blustering, fire-eating reactionary. There is also the beautiful quadroon, Palmyre Philosophe. The "united grace and pride of her movement was inspiring, but--what shall we say?--feline? It was a femininity without humanity,--something that made her, with all her superbness, a creature that one would want to find chained." Beside her are the dwarf Congo woman and Clemence, the sharp-tongued negress, who sells her wares in the streets and sends her bright retorts back to the young bloods who taunt her. There is Bras Coupe', the savage slave, who had once been a chief in Africa and who fights like a fiend against enslavement, blights the broad acres with his curse, lives an exile in snake-infested swamps, and finally meets a most tragic fate. These unusual and somewhat sensational characters give high color, warmth, and variety to the romance. The two exquisite Creole women, Aurora and her daughter, Clotilde, are a triumph of delicate characterization, being at one and the same time winning, lovable, illogical, innocent, capable, and noble. The love scene in which Aurora says "no," while she means "yes," and is not taken at her word, is as delicious a bit of humor and sentiment as there is in modern fiction. In neither _Dr. Sevier_ nor _Bonaventure_ are there the buoyancy, vital interest, and unity of impression of _The Grandissimes_, which is one of the artistic products of American novelists. Cable may not have rendered the Creole character exactly true to life; but he has in a measure done for these high-spirited, emotional, brave people what Irving did for the Knickerbockers of New York and what Hawthorne did for the Puritan.

Cable has also given graphic pictures of New Orleans. His poetic powers of description enabled him to make the picturesque streets, the quaint interiors, the swamps, bayous, forests, and streams very vivid realities to his readers. He has warmth of feeling and a most refined and subtle humor. His scenes are sometimes blood-curdling, his characters unusual, and the deeds described sensational; but in his best work, his manner is so quiet, his English so elegant, and his treatment so poetic, that the effect is never crude or harsh, but always mild and harmonious.

JAMES LANE ALLEN, 1849-

James Lane Allen was born in 1849 near Lexington, in the rich blue-grass section of Kentucky. He did not leave the state until he was twenty-two, so that his education both at school and college was received in Kentucky, and all his early and most impressionable years were passed amid Kentucky scenes. Many of these years were spent on a farm, where his faculty for observing was used to good advantage. As he grew older, he took his share in the farm work and labored in the fields of hemp, corn, and wheat, which he describes in his works. He graduated from Transylvania College, Lexington, and taught for several years, but after 1884 devoted himself to writing.

In 1891, Allen published _Flute and Violin and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances_. For artistic completeness, Allen wrote nothing superior to the story in this collection, entitled, _King Solomon of Kentucky_, a tale of an idle vagabond who proved capable of a heroism from which many heroes might have flinched. All of the stories are romantic and pathetic. _The Kentucky Cardinal_ (1894) and _Aftermath_ (1895) are poetic idyls, whose scenes are practically confined within one small Kentucky garden, where the strawberries grow, the cardinal sings, and the maiden watches across the fence her lover at his weeding. The compass of the garden is not too small to embody the very spirit of out-of-doors, which is continuously present in these two delightful stories.

From the human point of view, _The Choir Invisible_ (1897) is Allen's strongest book. John Gray, Mrs. Falconer, and Amy are convincingly alive. No better proof of the vital interest they arouse is needed than the impatience felt by the reader at John's mistaken act of chivalry, which causes the bitterest sorrow to him and Mrs. Falconer. Allen's later works, _The Reign of Law_ (1900), _The Mettle of the Pasture_ (1903), _The Bride of the Mistletoe_ (1909), lose in charm and grace what they gain as studies of moral problems. The hardness and incompleteness of outline of the character portrayals and the grimness of spirit in the telling of the tales make these novels uninviting after the luxuriance of the earlier books.

The setting is an important part of Allen's stories. He describes with the graphic touch of a true nature lover the witchery of Kentucky's fallow meadows, the beauty of her hempfields, the joys of a June day. A noisy conflict could not occur in the restful garden of _The Kentucky Cardinal_, while in the frontier garden of Mrs. Falconer, in _The Choir Invisible_, the ambitious, fiery John Gray seems not out of harmony because the presence of the adjacent wild forest affects the entire scene. In one way or another, the landscapes, by preparing the reader for the moods of the characters, play a part in all of Allen's novels. He is a master of the art that holds together scenes and actions. His descriptive powers are unusual, and his style is highly wrought. It is more that of the literary essayist than of the simple narrator, and it is full of poetic touches, delicate suggestions, and refined art.

MARY N. MURFREE (CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK), 1850-

Miss Mary Noailles Murfree, better known as Charles Egbert Craddock, was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in 1850. For fifteen years she spent her summers in the Tennessee mountains among the people of whom she writes. Her pen name of Charles Egbert Craddock deceived her publishers into the belief that she was a man. Both Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich accepted her stories for the _Atlantic Monthly_ without suspecting her sex, and Aldrich was a surprised man the day she entered his office and introduced herself as Charles Egbert Craddock.

The stories that suggested to her editors a masculine hand are lively recitals of family feuds, moonshiners' raids, circuit court sessions, fights over land grants, discoveries of oil, and many similar incidents, which make up the life of a people separated from the modern world by almost inaccessible mountains. The rifle is used freely by this people, and murder is frequent, but honor and bravery, daring and sacrifice, are not absent, and Craddock finds among the women, as well as the men, examples of magnanimity and heroism that thrill the reader.

The presence of the mountains is always imminent, and seems to impress the lives of the people in some direct way. To Cynthia Ware, for instance, in the story, _Drifting Down Lost Creek_, Pine Mountain seems to stand as a bar to all her ambitions and dreams:--

"Whether the skies are blue or gray, the dark, austere line of its summit
limits the horizon. It stands against the west like a barrier. It seems
to Cynthia Ware that nothing which went beyond this barrier ever came
back again. One by one the days passed over it, and in splendid
apotheosis, in purple and crimson and gold, they were received into the
heavens and returned no more. She beheld love go hence, and many a hope.
Even Lost Creek itself, meandering for miles between the ranges, suddenly
sinks into the earth, tunnels an unknown channel beneath the mountain,
and is never seen again."

And, finally, after a tremendous self-sacrifice, when all appears lost and her future looks colorless and hopeless, she fears that the years of her life are "like the floating leaves drifting down Lost Creek, valueless, purposeless, and vaguely vanishing in the mountains." All of the stories are by no means so tragically sad as this one, but all are overshadowed by the mountains. Among the best of the novels, _Down the Ravine_ and _The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountain_ may be mentioned. Craddock shows marked ability in delineating this primitive type of level-headed, independent people, and she tells their story with ease and vigor. The individual characters are not strongly differentiated in her many books, and the heroines bear considerable resemblance to each other, but the entire community of mountain folk, their ideals, hopes, and circumscribed lives are clearly and vividly shown.

MADISON J. CAWEIN, 1865-1914

Cawein spent the greater part of his life in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was born in 1865 and died in 1914. He wrote more than twenty volumes of verse, the best of which he collected in five volumes (1907) and later in one volume (1911). The appreciative English critic, Edmund Gosse, in his _Introduction_ to the 1907 collection, calls Cawein "the only hermit thrush" singing "through an interval comparatively tuneless." W. D. Howells's (p. 373) _Foreword_ in the 1911 volume emphasizes Cawein's unusual power of making common things 'live and glow thereafter with inextinguishable beauty.'

Cawein actually writes much of his poetry out of doors in the presence of the nature which he is describing. His lyrics of nature are his best verse. He can even diminish the horror of a Kentucky feud by placing it among:--

"Frail ferns and dewy mosses and dark brush,--
Impenetrable briers, deep and dense,
And wiry bushes,--brush, that seemed to crush
The struggling saplings with its tangle, whence
Sprawled out the ramble of an old rail-fence."

In his verses the catbird nests in the trumpet vine, the pewee pours forth a woodland welcome, the redbird sings a vesper song, the lilacs are musky of the May, the bluebells and the wind flowers bloom. We hear

"... tinkling in the clover dells,
The twilight sound of cattle bells."

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.

The greatest name in southern literature is that of Edgar Allan Poe, the literary artist, the critic, the developer of the modern short story, the writer of superlatively melodious verse. He was followed by Simms, who was among the first in the South to live by his pen. His tales of adventure are still interesting and important for the history that they embody. Timrod's spontaneity and strength appear in lyrics of war, nature, and love. Hayne, a skilled poetic artist, is at his best in lyrics of nature. Lanier's poems of nature embody high ideals in verse of unusual melody, and voice a faith in "the greatness of God," as intense as that of any Puritan poet. Lanier shared with Simms, Hayne, and Timrod the bitter misfortunes of the war. Father Ryan is affectionately remembered for his stirring war lyrics and Father Tabb for his nature poems, sacred verse, and entertaining humor. The nature poetry of Cawein abounds in the color and warmth of the South.

In modern southern fiction there is to be found some of the most imaginative, artistic, and romantic work of the entire country in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. Rich local color renders much of this fiction attractive. Harris fascinates the ear of the young world with the Georgia negro's tales of Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit. The Virginia negroes live in the stories of Page. Craddock introduces the Tennessee mountaineer, and Allen, the Kentucky farmer, scholar, and gentleman, while Cable paints the refined Creole in the fascinating city of New Orleans.

Notwithstanding the use of dialect and other realistic touches of local color, the fiction is largely romantic. The careful analysis of motives and detailed accounts of the commonplace, such as the eastern realists developed in the last part of the nineteenth century, are for the most part absent from this southern fiction.

A strong distinguishing feature of this body of fiction is the large part played by natural scenes. Allen shows unusual skill in employing nature to heighten his effects. If the poetic and vivid scenes were removed from Cable's stories, they would lose a large part of their charm. When Miss Murfree chooses eastern Tennessee for the scene of her novels, she never permits the mountains to be forgotten. These writers are lovers of nature as well as of human beings. The romantic prose fiction as well as the poetry is invested with color and beauty.

REFERENCES

Page's _The Old South_.

Page's _Social Life in Old Virginia before the War_.

Hart's _Slavery and Abolition_.

Baskerville's _Southern Writers_, 2 vols.

Link's _Pioneers of Southern Literature_, 2 vols.

Moses's _The Literature of the South_.

Holliday's _A History of Southern Literature_.

Manly's _Southern Literature_.

Painter's _Poets of the South_.

Woodberry's _The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, Personal and Literary, with his chief Correspondence with Men of Letters,_ 2 vols., 1909. (The best life.)

Woodberry and Stedman's _The Works of Edgar Allan Poe with a Memoir, Critical Introductions, and Notes_, 10 vols.

Harrison's _The Virginia Edition of the Works of Edgar Allan Poe_, 17 vols. (Contains excellent critical essays.)

Harrison's _Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe_, 2 vols.

Stedman's _Poets of America_. (Poe.)

Fruit's _The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry_.

Canby's _The Short Story in English_, Chap. XI. (Poe.)

Baldwin's _American Short Stories_. (Poe.)

Payne's _American Literary Criticism_. (Poe.)

Prescott's _Selections from the Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, edited with an Introduction and Notes_.

Gates's _Studies and Appreciations_. (Poe.)

Trent's _William Gilmore Simms_.

Erskine's _Leading American Novelists_. (Simms.)

Ward's _Memorial of Sidney Lanier_, in _Poems of Sidney Lanier_, edited by his Wife.

Burt's _The Lanier Book_.

Burt and Cable's _The Cable Story Book_.

Page's _The Page Story Book_.

SUGGESTED READINGS

Selections (not always the ones indicated below) from _all_ the authors mentioned in this chapter may be found in Trent's _Southern Writers_, 524 pages, and Mims and Payne's _Southern Prose and Poetry for Schools_, 440 pages. Selections from the majority of the poets are given in Painter's _Poets of the South_, 237 pages, and Weber's _Selections from the Southern Poets_, 221 pages. The best poems of Poe and Lanier may be found in Page's _The Chief American Poets_.

POETRY

POE.--His best poems are short, and may soon be read. They are _Annabel Lee_, _To One in Paradise_, _The Raven_, _The Haunted Palace_, _The Conqueror Worm_, _Ulalume_, _Israfel_, _Lenore_, and _The Bells_.

HAYNE.--_A Dream of the South Winds_, _Aspects of the Pines_, _The Woodland Phases_, and _A Storm in the Distance_.

TIMROD.--_Spring_, _The Lily Confidante_, _An Exotic_, _The Cotton Boll_, and _Carolina_.

LANIER.--_The Marshes of Glynn_, _Sunrise_, _The Song of the Chattahoochee_, _Tampa Robins_, _Love and Song_, _The Stirrup Cup_, and _The Symphony_.

RYAN.--_The Conquered Banner_, and _The Sword of Robert Lee_.

TABB.--Fourteen of his complete poems may be found on two pages (489 and 490) of Stedman's _An American Anthology_. Much of Tabb's best work is contained in his little volume entitled _Poems_ (1894).

CAWEIN.--_The Whippoorwill_, _There are Fairies_, _The Shadow Garden_, _One Day and Another_, _In Solitary Places_, _A Twilight Moth_, _To a Wind Flower_, _Beauty and Art_, _A Prayer for Old Age_.

The best two volumes of general selections from Cawein's verse have been published in England and given the titles, _Kentucky Poems_ (1902), 264 pages, edited with an excellent _Introduction_ by Edmund Gosse, and _New Poems_ (1909), 248 pages. His best nature poetry will be found in his single American volume of selections, entitled _Poems, Selected by the Author_ (1911).

PROSE

POE.--Poe's best short story is _The Fall of the House of Usher_, but it is better to begin with such favorites as either _The Murders in the Rue Morgue_, _The Gold-Bug_, or _A Descent into the Maelstrom_. There are many poor editions of Poe's _Tales_. Cody's _The Best Tales of Edgar Allan Poe_ and Macmillan's _Pocket Classics_ edition may be recommended. The best part of his critical remarks on short-story writing is quoted in this text, p. 299. A part of his essay, _The Poetic Principle_, is given in Trent.

SIMMS.--Mims and Payne give (pp. 50-69) a good selection from _The Yemassee_, describing an Indian episode in the war of 1715, between the Spaniards and the Indians on the one hand, and the English on the other. Trent gives (pp. 186-189) from _The Partisan_, a scene laid at the time of the Revolutionary War.

HARRIS.--Read anywhere from _Uncle Remus, his Songs, and his Sayings_ (1880), _Nights with Uncle Remus_ (1881), _Uncle Remus and his Friends_ (1892). An excellent selection, _Brother Billy Goat eats his Dinner_, is given in Trent.

CABLE.--_Madame Delphine_ and _Jean-ah-Poquelin_, two of Cable's best short stories, are published under the title, _Old Creole Days_.

PAGE, ALLEN, AND CRADDOCK.--From Page, read either _Marse Chan_ or _Meh Lady_; from Allen, _King Solomon of Kentucky_, and _Two Gentlemen of Kentucky,_ from _Flute and Violin,_ or _The Kentucky Cardinal,_ or _The Choir Invisible_; from Craddock, selections from _Down the Ravine,_ _In the Tennessee Mountains,_ or _The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountain._

QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

Poetry.--Which of Poe's nine poems indicated for reading pleases you most and which least? What is the chief source of your pleasure in reading him? Do you feel like reading any of his poems a second time or repeating parts of them? Account for the extraordinary vitality of Poe's verse. What is the subject matter of most of his poems?

What is the subject of Lanier's best verse? Compare his melody and ideals with Poe's. Is Lanier's _Song of the Chattahoochee_ as melodious as Tennyson's _The Brook?_ Which is the most beautiful stanza in _My Springs?_ What are the strongest and most distinguishing qualities of Lanier's verse? Which of these are especially prominent in _The Marshes of Glynn_ and _Sunrise,_ and which in _Tampa Robins?_

Compare Hayne and Timrod for artistic finish, definiteness, and spontaneity. Does Hayne or Timrod love nature more for herself alone? Select the best stanza from Timrod's _The Lily Confidante_ and compare it with your favorite stanza from Lanier's _My Springs._ From each of the poems of Hayne suggested for reading, select some of the most artistic creations of his fancy.

Indicate the patriotism and the pathos in Father Ryan's verse.

Point out some unique qualities in Tabb's poetry. Is the length of his poems in accordance with Poe's dictum? Select some passage showing special delicacy or originality in describing nature.

What in Cawein's verse would indicate that he wrote his poems out of doors? Compare the definiteness of his references to nature with Hayne's. What specific references in Cawein's nature poems please you most? Compare Keats's poems _On the Grasshopper and Cricket, Fancy,_ and stanzas here and there from _The Eve of St. Agnes_ with Cawein's imagery and method of appealing to the senses.

Prose.--Take one of Poe's tales, and point out how it illustrates his theory of the short story given on p. 299. In order to hold the attention of an average audience, should you select for reading one of Irving's, Hawthorne's, or Poe's short stories? Should you use the same principle in selecting one of these stories for a friend to read quietly by himself?

Is Simms dramatic? In what particulars does he remind you of Cooper? In the selection from _The Yemassee_ (Mims and Payne) are there any qualities which Poe indicates for a short story?

What is the secret of the attractiveness of the stories of Joel Chandler Harris? Point out some valuable philosophy of human nature which frequently crops out. What special characteristics of Uncle Remus are revealed in these tales? What are the most prominent qualities of Brer Rabbit? Why does the negro select him for his hero? What is the final result of Brer Fox's trick in _The Wonderful Tar Baby Story_? What resemblances and differences can you find between the animal stories of Harris and Kipling?

Why are Cable's stories called romantic? What remarkable feature do you notice about their local color? Give instances of his poetic touch and of his power to draw character. Does he reveal his characters in a plain, matter-of-fact manner, or by means of subtle touches and unexpected revelations?

Compare Page's negroes with Uncle Remus. What characteristics of Virginia life do the stories of Page reveal? What do you find most attractive in him as a story-teller?

What impression does Allen's _King Solomon of Kentucky_ make on you? What are some of the strong situations in _The Choir Invisible_? What effect does the natural setting have on his scenes?

In the presentation of what scenes does Craddock excel? What are some of the characteristics of her mountain people? Is the individuality of the characters strongly marked or are they more frequently general types? In what parts of the South are the scenes of the stories of Cable, Page, Allen, and Craddock chiefly laid? How should you define "local color" in terms of the work of each of these writers?