Lancaster daily intelligencer. [volume] (Lancaster, Pa.) 1864-1928, 1881-06-18
Southern LtEo and Literature.

LOUISVILLE courier JOURNAL.
With all the clements of poetry and
romance in its history, its traditions and
its daily life, it is strange that the litera-
ture of the South should be SO barren.
Ones imagination is stirred with the tales
told around the fireside or by the recollec-
tion Of the plantation life before the war.
In the civil conflict perished utterly great
civilization. Leaving out all questions of
politics, and considering life in the South
merely as material for the bOokmaker, for
the man of letters and it is a rich field as
yet untouched. The old slave days are
fading both from the memory of master
and servant. Half generation has passed
since slavery perished and slaves became
voters the "old masters" are many of
them under the sod the young mistress
remembers the life on the old plantation
home, when she remembers it at all, with
grief and sadness. War scattered the old
families and poverty divided and destroyed
the old homes. What is recalled is recalled
only with bitterness and longing. The
story of many southern mansions for the
past twenty years would he pitiful one,
but the world waits for the artist who can
tell it. The lights and shadows are strong
and dark wealth and poverty, love and
hate, life full and rich, death clothed in all
its terrors, war, rapine and revolution fol-
lowed so swiftly that they trod one upon
tho others heels
Tue future of the man Of letters who has
sympathy and knowledge, and sense of
color, an cyo for perspective, appreciation
of the surroundings, apprehension of ''the
soul Of good in things evil" will some day
gather together the romances of this re-
gion will tell of the men aud women who
here lived and loved and died, and find
himelf famous. 1t was a race worthy of
hero worship; the men were strong,
brave, knightly, domineering the women
moved the hearts to love as the winds
move hearts to music. There were devel-
oped individuality and originality there
was room for difference and diversity
Passion, high, noble, generous, self-sacri-
flclng. stirred some natures, whiic in
others were developed all that was coarse,
vile and brutal. Types innumerSme are
to be found there only one must \e5le
to distinguish them.
Then no land in itself has more romance
in its natural scenery. Artists usually
make too much or too little of their natural
surroundings. Some ignore them alto
gether others describe them most elabo-
rately, until it wearies. Most writer's con-
slider nature only frame for the picture,
instead Of . part Of it. Every man or
woman with fine, high instincts of SEN
sitive nature, is more or less influenced,
consciously or unconsciously, by his or her
natural surroundings. Trees, hills, rivers,
ravines. flowers, birds, an combine to
make the man. "I am part Of all that 1
have seen," cried Ulysses, as he drew
near to the end of his .journeyings. In
those Southern homes, with their pillared
porches and vine-covcrd porticoes, with
their jasmine and honeysuckles, with
their groves and forest trees, their hills
and dales, their brooks and rivers. their
long winding roads, their long, lazy sum-