ANNOUNCEMENT.

This book is a collection of sketches and essays written at different periods, with no thought that they would survive the occasions that called them forth.

The suggestion that I collect as many of them as were accessible and publish them in book form, came first from others.

With little or no prestige and no great publishing house behind me, I of course, expect nothing more than a local interest in the book; but some of the subjects discussed, I think, are of historical value, and I hope that others, both by style and sentiment, will attract some of my young friends. stimulate their literary taste, and incite them to literary effort, while all may find a few appreciative readers among those who are to live after me. H. P. GRIFFITH.

October 12th, 1911.

TO THE MEMORY

OF

MY SAINTED WIFE

who, after having been my counsellor and strong support for fifty years through sunshine and shadow, never once swerving in her devotion, departed from this world on the 24th of August, 1911, and left me here to complete the journey in loneliness and sorrow, this book is devotedly inscribed.

TIMROD AND HIS POETRY.

Literary and Social Conditions.

It is a remarkable fact that the period which produced three of the greatest poets of the South, was one of storm and disaster. For two hundred years "Dixie's Land" smiled in beauty, and generations of men and women of delicately strung and exquisitely toned organism, came and went, and there was no hand to strike the ready-strung lyre, nor voice to embalm their thoughts and feelings in deathless song. Through all those years of rest and silence, Poetry was sleeping in the Southern vales, rippling in the limpid, flower-bordered rivers, blushing in the softly tinted skies, and throbbing in the lofty mountain peaks;-sleeping, rippling, blushing, throbbing, and waiting for the whirlwind and the earthquake to arouse her from her lethargy and awake her into voiceful, soulful, melodious life. The vales were to become the haunts of stalking, gigantic shadows; the limpid rivers were to be stained with blood and their rippling laughter changed into murmuring woe; the skies of softly tinted blue were to become lurid with smoke and flame; and the silent, watchful mountains were to shake under the tread of hostile