While visiting at Sunnyside, Georgia,
some sixty miles from Macon, he was struck at once with
the beauty of cornfields and the pathos of deserted farms.
Hence arose his first poem that attracted attention throughout the country.
He took it to New York with him in the fall. Writing to his friend,
Judge Logan E. Bleckley, now Chief Justice of Georgia, who during this summer
spoke encouraging words to him about the faith he had in his literary future,
he inclosed his recently finished poem with these words: --
195 Dean St., Brooklyn, N.Y.
October 9, 1874.
My dear Sir, -- I could never tell you how sincerely grateful I am to you,
and shall always be, for a few words you spoke to me recently.
Such encouragement would have been pleasant at any time,
but this happened to come just at a critical moment when,
although I had succeeded in making up my mind finally and decisively
as to my own career, I was yet faint from a desperate struggle
with certain untoward circumstances which it would not become me to detail.
Did you ever lie for a whole day after being wounded, and then have water
brought you? If so, you will know how your words came to me.
I inclose the manuscript of a poem in which I have endeavored to carry some
very prosaic matters up to a loftier plane. I have been struck with alarm
in seeing the number of old, deserted homesteads and gullied hills
in the older counties of Georgia; and though they are dreadfully commonplace,
I have thought they are surely mournful enough to be poetic.
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