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AL 4 30, 2

V.

HARVARD COLLEG

NOV 24 1915

LIBRARY

Bright fund

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by

T. C. DE LEON,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the District of Maryland

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PREFACE.

A BOOK without a preface is like a salad without salt; but in offering the poems in this volume to the public, I can add little to what they speak for themselves.

The sole object of the collection is to make known a few noble poems that belong rather to the world than to any particular section, and to show those who have read REBEL RHYMES that

"There's life in the old land yet"

to do higher and better things.

Knowing that the South was surrounded during the war by a Chinese wall, that hid many important points of her history even from those beyond it, I was still surprised at the utter ignorance in the North of her having produced any thing like ́a high order of poetry. This ignorance extended, too, even to those whose principles or sympathies made them peer, with straining eyes, through every possible crevice in the barrier.

It is with diffidence, proportioned to the difficulties that surround it, that I have approached the task. The garland is to be gathered from a field extensive and teeming with a rank luxuriance of growth, that it must often puzzle the analyst to separate from the really valuable.

Little as is known of it, and confined, as it has ever been, to particular cliques, there is yet much latent literature in the South. The terrible friction, however, so long and so roughly applied, brought only the metrical element to the surface.

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