by far the most
successful was John Hay, a native of Indiana and private secretary to
President Lincoln, whose _Little Breeches_, _Jim Bludso_, and _Mystery
of Gilgal_ have rivaled Bret Harte's own verses in popularity. In the
last-named piece the reader is given to feel that there is something
rather cheerful and humorous in a bar-room fight which results in "the
gals that winter, as a rule," going "alone to singing school." In the
two former we have heroes of the Bret Harte type, the same combination
of superficial wickedness with inherent loyalty and tenderness. The
profane farmer of the South-west, who "doesn't pan out on the
prophets," and who had taught his little son "to chaw terbacker, just
to keep his milk-teeth white," but who believes in God and the angels
ever since the miraculous recovery of the same little son when lost on
the prairie in a blizzard; and the unsaintly and bigamistic captain of
the _Prairie Belle_, who died like a hero, holding the nozzle of his
burning boat against the bank

"Till the last galoot's ashore."

The manners and dialect of other classes and sections of the country
have received abundant illustration of late years. Edward Eggleston's
_Hoosier Schoolmaster_, 1871, and his other novels are pictures of
rural life in the early days of Indiana. _Western Windows_, a volume
of poems by John James Piatt, another native of Indiana, had an
unmistakable local coloring. Charles G. Leland, of Philadelphia, in
his Hans Breitmann ballads, in dialect, gave a humorous presentation of
the German-American element in the cities. By the death, in 1881, of
Sidney Lanier, a Georgian by birth, the South lost a poet of rare
promise, whose original genius was somewhat hampered by his hesitation
between two arts of expression, music and verse, and by his effort to
co-ordinate them. His _Science of English Verse_, 1880, was a most
suggestive, though hardly convincing, statement of that theory of their
relation which he was working out in his practice. Some of his pieces,
like the _Mocking Bird_ and the _Song of the Chattahoochie_, are the
most characteristically Southern poetry that has been written in
America. Joel Chandler Harris's _Uncle Remus_ stories, in Negro
dialect, are transcripts from the folk-lore of the plantations, while
his collection of stories, _At Teague Poteet's_, together with Miss
Murfree's _In the Tennessee Mountains_ and her other books, have made
the Northern public fam