IN the compilation of this volume the effort has been made to present some of the most important forms of prose and poetry. There will be found short stories, selections from historical romances, poems, essays, letters, and orations.

First in point of interest are the short stories and the selections from historical romances, and first among these is Poe's Fall of the House of Usher. Poe's originality in defining, by theory and practice, the type of short story gives him the pre-eminent position among the short-story writers of the South, and indeed of America. In his review of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales in 1842 he wrote the best statement of the province of this type of fiction, and gave the best analysis of his own tales:

“The ordinary story is objectionable from its length, for reasons already stated in substance. As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal modify, annul, or contract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book. But simply cessation in reading would, of itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fulness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer's control. There are no external or extrinsic influences—resulting from weariness or interruption.

“A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this pre-conceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. As by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided.”

The Fall of the House of Usher is a full realization of Poe's ideal as expressed in this quotation. It is the most typical of his stories—in its plot, its background, and its characters. The “totality of effect” insisted upon as characteristic of every story is produced in an impressive way in this tale. The story has no definite location on the map; and yet every detail of the background contributes to the climax. The singularly dreary tract of country, the black and lurid tarn, the vacant eye-like windows, the few rank sedges, the white trunks of decayed trees, the gothic archway of the hall, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, the phantasmagoric armorial trophies, the encrimsoned light and trellised panes of the windows—all these serve to render the total effect of the story startlingly impressive. Usher and his sister, like the heroes and heroines of Poe's other stories, are not flesh and blood characters, but rather fantastic creations of his own weird imagination. The general theme of the story—the passing away of a beautiful and fragile woman—is also characteristic, as is also the pellucid and at times highly colored style. If in his poetry Poe suggests comparison with Coleridge, in his prose one oftenest thinks of De Quincey. If at times he can be as clear cut in his style as the most extreme realist, at other times there is all the charm of melody and color. The pursuit of perfection in phrase and form was one of his most characteristic passions. After all, this is his great bequest to American, and especially to Southern, literature. Hawthorne's story, The Artist of the Beautiful, is an admirable interpretation of Poe's life and art. Nowhere else in these selections will there be seen such felicity and finality of style and such perfection of literary form as in The Fall of the House of Usher. In no other Southern stories is there such a steadfast adherence to the demands of art for art's sake.

There is little of the Southern landscape or character in Poe's poetry or prose. His imagination found a home only in far off lands, sometimes even in the Middle Ages, or yet again in the fantastic places of his own mind as it went voyaging through strange seas of imagination alone. “He haunted a borderland between the visible and the invisible, a land of waste places, ruined battlements, and shadowy forms, wrapped in a melancholy twilight.”

And yet there is a sense in which Poe was Southern, in temperament, and even in art. One may not go so far as a recent American critic when he says that Poe was as much the product of the South as Whittier was of New England, and still maintain that he has a distinct place among Southern writers. Though born in Boston he spent his youthful days in Richmond, as an adopted son in a family that was in close touch with the best elements of Southern life. At a Richmond classical school he received that classical training which was particularly characteristic of the ante-bellum South. He resided for one scholastic year at the newly established University of Virginia, where he added to his knowledge of the classics an intimate study of modern literature. In Baltimore he received his first recognition when the committee of which John P. Kennedy was a member discovered his genius as a poet and as a writer of short stories. In 1835 he became editor of the most distinctively Southern magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger, in which he published some of his best tales and his criticisms of contemporary writings. It is in his critical writings that Poe's Southern bent of mind was most notably evinced; for here he manifested a characteristic prejudice against New England writers and a corresponding sympathy with Southern writers. “He always lived in the North as an alien,” says Professor Woodberry, “somewhat on his guard, somewhat contemptuous of his surroundings, always homesick for the place that he well knew would know him no more though he were to return to it.” No apology need therefore be made for including him among Southern writers.

More characteristic of the South, however, were those romances in which William Gilmore Simms, John P. Kennedy, John Esten Cooke, and later writers, realizing the wealth of material in Southern history and tradition, wrought out their stirring historical romances. The selections from these romances, included in this volume, suggest various periods of Southern and national history. The historical background of Simms's The Yemassee is the conflict between the Indians and the English colonists of South Carolina about the year 1715. Simms's early life fitted him pre-eminently for the rôle of a romancer. The stories of the Revolutionary War and of the early colonial era, told to him by his grandmother, the weird tales of ghosts and witches which he gathered from other story-tellers, and his actual contact with pioneers and Indians in the South-west—all stimulated in him a natural fondness for stirring, romantic themes. This temperament, enhanced by study of colonial history and traditions, culminated in The Yemassee, and in his romance of the Revolution, The Partisan.

A better story of the Revolutionary era, however, is Horse-Shoe Robinson, published in 1835 by John P. Kennedy. The selection given from this book presents some idea of the romantic warfare carried on by the mountaineers of North and South Carolina against the despotism of the Tory ascendancy. The elemental humanity, the courage, the resourcefulness, and the perseverance of Horse-Shoe Robinson are suggested in Kennedy's characterization of him and in the capture of the five Scotchmen with the aid of a brave and adventurous lad.

John Esten Cooke, who is more popularly known by his stories of the Civil War, is represented by a citation from his earliest book, The Virginia Comedians, or Old Days in the Old Dominion, the background of which is the era just preceding the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. The scene is laid in Williamsburg at the time when the new forces of freedom and democracy were struggling against the Established Church and the feudal system of society which then prevailed in Virginia. Perhaps the most interesting part of the novel is the account given of the acting of the first play ever performed in America, The Merchant of Venice.

While they do not belong strictly to this section of the book, the editors have thought well to put here the selections from Audubon and Crockett, as giving better than any fiction the real spirit of the pioneer days.

Of the stirring incidents of the Civil War, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page's Burial of the Guns gives a most striking suggestion. The story is complete in itself, and in its presentation of the heroism and tragedy of that fateful era leaves little to be said. The time has not yet come when the full meaning of that great struggle can be suggested in dramatic or romantic form, but the stories of Mr. Page, notably Marse Chan and Meh Lady, are clearly an anticipation of greater work yet to be done. The transition from the old order to the new is best seen in the novels of another Virginia writer, Miss Ellen Glasgow. The Voice of the People, from which a selection is given, is not only a work of art, but is a real contribution to the interpretation of the present South.

Distinctly different in type and in quality from Poe's stories and from the selections from historical romances are the short stories of Southern writers which have to do with local scenes and characters. The short story after the Civil War had to do principally with the characteristics of the various sections and even States of the Republic. Bret Harte, in his stories of Western life, inaugurated a new era in American fiction. A host of American writers have followed his lead in exploring the different sections and in explaining the people of one State to the people of the others. The short story has become the national mode of utterance in the things of the imagination. In the absence of any truly national novel, which has so long been the ideal of American story writers and critics, these short stories of local color have served to reveal provincial types and local scenes. With their contemporaries in all sections of the country the Southern writers have wrought to this end. About 1875 their short stories began to appear in Northern magazines. Gradually they revealed all the picturesque phases of Southern life and scenery. Their writings have served to reveal the South to itself and to the nation. To these authors literature has been a profession and not a pastime. They have written with discipline and restraint, and the best of them take their rank among the best contemporary writers of America.

In some of the short stories that are selected as typical the interest is that of the character sketch. From Southern stories and novels there might be gathered passages which would be a complete portrait gallery of Southern men and women. In the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, Charles Egbert Craddock, Thomas Nelson Page, George W. Cable, James Lane Allen, and John Fox we have a great variety of types—the old-time negro, the Southern gentleman and lady, the Creole, the mountaineer, and the Kentuckians of the blue-grass country. In these provincial types, and especially in Free Joe and Jean-ah Poquelin, we have the portrayal of that elemental nature which makes the whole world kin.

In other stories the chief point of interest is the delicate handling of landscape. Southern writers have been quick to realize the wealth of natural scenery that awaited writers with seeing eyes and portraying hands. No writer has displayed greater power of description than Miss Murfree, from whose stories a series of masterly paintings might be sketched. In The Star in the Valley the mountains play an important rôle. They, along with the trees, the sun, moon, and stars, are not merely spectators but participants. In fact, one feels at times that the author has let her undoubted ability of description interfere with her dramatic presentation of characters. She lingers over the setting of her pictures too long; and yet in this way she has ministered to one of the essential appeals made by modern fiction—the feeling for landscape.

The same point may be made with regard to the exquisite landscapes of Mr. James Lane Allen's stories. Nature is an important character in his Kentucky Cardinal, The Choir Invisible, and the Summer in Arcady. Her influence streams through the story, sometimes serving as a background, but oftener as a sort of chorus to the drama of human nature. His ability to describe and interpret nature may well be seen in the selection entitled On a Day in June. Only the careful reading of all his stories will give one any adequate idea of the poetic glamour which he has cast over those fair regions, or his romantic, and even transcendental, attitude to nature.

Surely no American writer ever had a finer background for his stories and novels than George W. Cable. In his Old Creole Days and The Grandissimes we have the artistic blending of scenery, architecture, and romance. Now it is the rich luxuriance of the swamps and bayous, now the Rue Royale—a long narrowing perspective of arcades, lattices, balconies, dormer windows, and blue sky—and yet again some large old Creole mansion that survives as a reminder of the romantic past.

It must not be thought, however, that these story writers, in suggesting the wealth of natural scenery and human nature, are lacking in the ability to construct artistic plots. None of them equals Poe in his ability to produce a single startling plot. And yet the short stories that are presented in this book deserve to rank, even from the stand-point of artistic structure, among the best American stories.

Aside from all question of local background or types of human nature or plot, Southern fiction is pre-eminently the product of the Southern temperament. A writer in the Atlantic Monthly, reviewing Southern fiction as a whole, said in 1885: “It is not the subjects offered by Southern writers which interest us so much as the manifestation of a spirit which seemed to be dying out of our literature. . . . We should not be greatly surprised if the historian of our literature a few generations hence should take note of an enlargement of American letters at this time through the agency of a new South. . . . The North refines to a keen analysis, the South enriches through a generous imagination. The breadth which characterizes the best Southern writings, the large free handling, the confident imagination, are legitimate results of the careless yet masterful and hospitable life which has pervaded that section. We have had our laugh at the florid, coarse-flavored literature which has not yet disappeared at the South, but we are witnessing now the rise of a school that shows us the worth of generous nature when it has been schooled and ordered.”

The same may be said of the best Southern poetry, which forms the second part of this volume. The selections have been arranged in groups rather than chronologically or according to their authors. They are printed in the following divisions: nature poems, tributes to Southern heroes, narratives in verse, love poems, and reflective poems. It will be seen that these subjects indicate the various appeals that poetry makes to the human heart. For a long time the writing of poetry was at a discount in the South. The author of one of the most popular ante-bellum lyrics was urged by his friends never to have anything to do with poetry—advice that was typical of the attitude of many Southerners. Those who did write poetry paid little heed to the human life or nature about them. Their poetry was likely to be sentimental and in its choice of subjects remote from the interests of everyday life. Following the lead of Byron, they had a view of life which was melancholy and at times morbid.

Even in the ante-bellum period, however, there were some poems that suggested the characteristic land-scapes of the South. We find such poems in Meek's Land of the South, Timrod's Cotton Boll, and in poems on the mocking-bird by Albert Pike, Meek, and Richard Henry Wilde.

The writers of the new South have, like the short-story writers already mentioned, been far more sensitive to local influence. Paul Hamilton Hayne, after the Civil War, lived at Copse Hill, near Augusta, Georgia. His devotion to poetry under so many adverse circumstances is one of the finest traditions of American literary history. He lived in a cabin of his own building—an extraordinary shanty which seemed to have been tossed by a supernatural pitchfork upon the most desolate of hills. Around him, however, were forests of pines, and of these in all their relations to cloud and sky and sun he has written many of his best poems, some of which are reproduced in the selections herewith given.