ABSTRACT
At a time when the war of secession had left the South in a condition which appeared to render an exclusively literary life a hopeless impossibility, Mr. Hayne immured himselfin the woods ofGeorgia, and gave himself wholly to his pen. Perhaps this was the most convincing method he could have adopted of testifying by acts to his poetic nascitur.v for it was striking an audacious challenge-blow on the very shield of Fate, and probably none but a poet would have dared it. Doubtless, the struggle which succeeded was passionate, fierce, often bitter, sometimes despairing; one finds traces of all this along the music of these verses. It is pleasant now to open Legends and Lyrics with the knowledge that the darkest of his conflict is over, and that in the growing light of appreciation his by-past shadow will show only like a dark calyx through which the poet's rose offame is bursting.
