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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (June 1, 1900)
THE BATTALION. (> he had the gospel preached to him and became civilized for the first time sin e the dawn of his creation. The South is thinking, reading, and investigating more, and keeping a bet ter system of records than ever before in htr history. Hawthorne and Lemon say: “We have been hearing more from the South of late, and are likely to hear more yet in the future; indeed, it is more than possible that another generation may find us receiving our best literature from that part of our country.” We are beginning to realize our want of a true history, for we have been grievously misrepresented, and unle s we see to our vindication, we sh 11 be judged as charged. I hope you will pardon me for saying that most of us are criminally negligent in s u lyin';- and teaching the literature of tho South. Most of the public schools that at tempt to teach literature at all, go through the form of teaching Shake speare, or Milton, to children, whose minds are not sufficiently mature o comprehend these authors. The proper place to teach that class of literature is the college or university. We have always neglected home tal ent. Poe received only ten dollars for “The Raven.” The .South threw him off to starve. He was very popular in France, while England regards him as as the greatest American poet, and is held in high esteem as a prose writer, as is shown by the fact that thirty- seven thousand copies of his t les were sold in England in 1887. The sweet, gent’e spirit of Lanier foueht against poverty till deuth relieve! the pc or sufferer. Though he has been dead only a few years, his fame is growing so bright that we shall soon be building monuments to his memory. O’Hara wrote “Bivouac of the Dead” to celebrate Southern heroes. It has been selected by the North as the most fit poem to celebrate their sleeping dead, and may be seen in the National Cemetery at Washington. Dr. W. T. Harris said last wint r at Galveston that Southern poets had written poems that the nations could not foryret and our prose writers had written things as great as ever written by Browning. The South is rich in materia 1 for rich and rare fiction. The negro, with his darkey ways; the creole, with his peculiar life and mongrel language the mountaineer, with isolated home and simple wants, are character 5 worthy of the pen of a Scott or Dick ens. The mountain scenery of Virgin a, North Carolina and Tennessee; the balmy breeze from the gulf; the cap tivating beauty of orange groves; dense forests, musical with feathery songsters; skies rivaling those of Ital , must inspire the poet and stimulate the novelist. In conclusion, I beg of you to find a place in your course of study for Southern literature. Ask your boards of trustees to make it a permanent fea ture of their schools. Encourage you • pupils to read our best authors, and thp biographies of Lee and Stonewall Jackson. This is a duty we owe to the “Old South,” whose glory will yet emeree from the shadows of an unfortunate war. It is a duty we owe ourselvee and the rising generations who w 11 judge us and the generation now pass ing away, and will accurately write our history. In doing this work let us have as our guiding star the motto of Abraham Lincoln, “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”