_Maurice Thompson and Mrs. Preston._--Our notice of Southern writers may conclude with Maurice Thompson and Mrs. Margaret Preston. James Maurice Thompson (1844-1901) is commonly associated with the Middle West, since he was born and died in Indiana. His early life, however, was spent in Kentucky and Georgia, he saw service in the Confederate Army, and much of his verse and prose carries the stamp of his experiences in the South and his acquaintance with Southern literature. He was a lawyer by profession, but by instinct a natural scientist. In 1885 he was appointed State Geologist of Indiana. From 1890 on he was connected with the New York _Independent_. His style was crisp and neat, sometimes over-elaborate; but he kept an eye on the thing he was talking about, so that in general what he has said of nature is very acceptable. His devotion to the pastimes of fishing and archery gave him a good deal of literary material. His extensive and exact knowledge of the ways of birds enters into many of his poems, as for example “An Early Bluebird.” The strain of regenerate patriotism in “Lincoln’s Grave” is the same that we find in Lanier. Mrs. Preston (1820-97) was the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Junkin, founder of Lafayette College and afterward president of Washington and Lee University, in Virginia. Before her marriage, in 1857, she had done some writing. In 1866 she published “Beechenbrook, a Rhyme of the War”; in 1870, “Old Songs and New.” Her “Cartoons” (1875) and “Colonial Ballads” (1887) show her at her best. She has been styled “the greatest Southern poetess”; there have been few claimants to dispute the title.
=Major Poets of New England.=--With this caption we return to the main stream of American verse, and reach the men whose lives and works may be said to justify a connected account of poetry in the United States. We shall take up Longfellow first. Whatever vicissitudes his literary standing has suffered, or is likely to suffer, he is bound for a long time to appear as the central figure among our poets.
_Henry Wadsworth Longfellow._--The subject of this sketch was born in Portland, Maine, February 27, 1807. He came of a gifted stock. His father was a lawyer of ability, and his mother a woman of artistic temperament and varied attainments, so that the boy grew up in an atmosphere of study and refinement. Longfellow was a wise and gentle child, fond of books, not too sensitive, always normal and sane. Until 1821 he went to school in Portland; in 1822 he entered the sophomore class at Bowdoin College. Here he attained a good rank in scholarship, and became acquainted, not intimately, with the future novelist Hawthorne. Upon graduation in 1825, Longfellow went abroad, in order to fit himself for a professorship in modern languages which lay open to him at Bowdoin. He visited France, Germany, England, and the South of Europe; on his return in 1829 he gave himself up with ardour and success to the activity of teaching. In 1831 he was married to Miss Mary S. Potter. In 1835, having received an invitation to the chair of modern languages at Harvard, he went abroad again for further travel and study, this time mainly to Germany and the North. The death of his young wife, shortly after their arrival in Holland, filled his cup with bitterness, but did not swerve him from preparation for the duties of his chair at Cambridge. Nevertheless, as may be read beneath the surface of his romance “Hyperion,” his determination that he must ultimately become a poet, and not end as a teacher in the classroom, can be traced to this critical epoch in his life.