But the shadow alone remains; the substance has departed--"There are no birds in last year's nest." If the literary reputation of the United States had been rated, up to the close of the Rebellion, on the contributions of Southern men--fiction, prose and poetry, science, art, and invention--the polite nations of the world would have regarded us as a nation of semi-barbarians.

But, happily, the rugged genius of New England made up then and makes up now for the poverty of literary effort on the part of the South.

True, a few men since the war have placed the South in a better light; but even their work, as an index of Southern genius, is regarded as highly precocious and tentative.
The South has yet to demonstrate that she has capacity for high literary effort.

In the process of that demonstration, I am fully persuaded that the Anglo-African--with his brilliant wit and humor, his highly imaginative disposition and his innate fondness for literary pursuits--will contribute largely to give the South an enviable and honorable position.
What the South lacked in literary effort before the war she made up in a magnificent galaxy of meteoric statesmen, who rushed into politics with the instinct of ducks taking to water, and who were forgotten, in the majority of cases, before they had run out their ephemeral career.
A few names have survived the earthquake, and are remembered for their cleverness rather than their depth.

A few more decades, and they will be remembered only by the curious student who plods his weary way through the labyrinth of Congressional records and the musty archives of States, seeking for data of times which long ago passed into the hazy vista of history and romance.