Literary Hearthstones of Dixie by La Salle Corbell Pickett
page 49 of 146 (33%)
page 49 of 146 (33%)
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of old Charleston to prepare the soul for their riveting.
Unfortunately, the teacher of that school thus honored by the presence of two budding poets had not a mind attuned to poesy. Seeing the boys communing together in violation of the rules made and provided for school discipline, he promptly and sharply recalled them to the subjects wisely laid down in the curriculum. Notwithstanding this early discouragement, the youthful poet, abetted by his faithful fellow song-bird, persevered in his erratic way, and Charleston had the honor of being the home of one who has been regarded as the most brilliant of Southern poets. When Henry Timrod finished his course of study in the chilling atmosphere in which his poetic ambition first essayed to put forth its tender leaflets, he entered Franklin College, in Athens, the nucleus of what is now the University of Georgia. A few years ago a visitor saw his name in pencil on a wall of the old college. The "Toombs oak" still stood on the college grounds, and it may be that its whispering leaves brought to the youthful poet messages of patriotism which they had garnered from the lips of the embryonic Georgia politician. Timrod spent only a year in the college, quitting his studies partly because his health failed, and partly because the family purse was not equal to his scholastic ambition. Returning to Charleston at a time when that city cherished the ambition to become to the South what Boston was to the North, he helped form the coterie of writers who followed the leadership of that burly and sometimes burry old Mentor, William Gilmore Simms. The young poet seems not to have been among the docile members of the flock, for when Timrod's first volume of poems was published Hayne wrote to |
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