Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: flDaurice Ghompson. THE greatest writers cannot agree in defining genius. No university has ever framed a course of study adapted to its varied and peculiar wants. For my part, I am glad that scholars had no chance to put Jonson's " learned sock " on " sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child." Was it not fortunate that Burns's head was filled with stories of warlocks and witches, with ballads and old wives' fables, instead of Latin nouns, Greek verbs, and mathematical problems? Suppose Scott's school reputation was one of irregular ability, and Wordsworth would read Richardson's novels when he should have been cramming for examination; granted that Thackeray's schoolfellows, peering over his shoulder, did always find him making humorous and fantastic sketches from Homer, from Horace, from Scott's poems, from Cooper's novels (he seldom had any other kind of books in his hand then), and that Bunyan had only two books in his library—" did not each in the end get that education which suited him best and enriched the world most ? Ever and anon there comes a time when our poets must touch mother earth and grow strong again. In this way literature becomes fresher and sweeter and loses that bookishness which handicaps Pegasus, though Milton or George Eliot be the rider. Is it an unhealthy sign that so many of our younger writers are not college bred ? Those of the Southern school had small chance to get a collegiate education. But they grew up at a time and amid surroundings that fitted them far better to create a new, fresh, and original literature. A typical example is the subject of this sketch. Although he has not commonly been classed with the Southern school, there is not one of them more distinctly Southern in his lineage, his life, and his writings. He was reared in the South. ...