Excerpt from The Outlook for Literature in the South: A Lecture

The Declaration of Independence, written and signed by individuals, had in fact already been drawn up in the thoughts of the colonial settlers, written in their deeds of heroic bravery and signed by life blood spent in reclaiming their new homes and bulwarking them against impending storms. It took the concentrated power of the colonies to draught this declaration, and their minds, busied with this task, found little time for the milder occupations of letters. Nation building is absorbing work. A constitution, to last through a century or more of change and threatened dis asters, tested by all the arts of peace and war, must be written in wisdom and sealed with reverence. No novice hand could pen such a paper. Men, whose faces had been plowed into furrows by deep-sinking thought, in their own homes and around the council table, on the hustings and in the legislative halls, gave it their best and most strenuous attention. Around them gathered the best minds of those less gifted to lead, and thoughts that at other times would have been entrusted to the patient page, were deep cut in the palimpsests of the brain or branded into the very substance of the heart. And for years afterward, during the crucial days of the nation's experiments, there were needed all her men of talent and skill to read her destiny and direct her course. Virginia, a centre of political and intellectual life, answered her country's appeal for guidance with numerous men, whose tongues of fire with a hearty eloquence added no little to the fame of American oratory. Trenchant, pens, guided by wise hands and driven by a rare intensity of will, wrote such political essays as the world has seldom seen. Statesmen were plentiful'; men aspiring to be statesmen more plentiful still. The rewards of politics glistened, and men of brain-fibre and ambition felt the impulses to polit ical life. Triumphs here were worth the trouble, while Virginians, reflecting English life, made little of the career of letters, and authors hid their real life - their literary activity - under the cover of some less important profession.

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