The significance of the national spirit in these two poems may be seen
only when it is looked at from the standpoint of the sectionalism
that prevailed in the South and in the North. At the very time
when Lanier was writing them, men in Congress were giving
exhibitions of partisanship and prejudice that threatened
to make of the Centennial a farce. "The fate of the Centennial bill
in Congress," he writes to Dudley Buck, "reveals -- in spite of its passage --
a good deal of opposition. All this will die out in a couple of months,
and THEN every one will be in a temper to receive a poem of reconciliation.
I fancy that to print the poem NOW will be much like making a dinner speech
before the wine has been around." Indeed, there were few men in America
at this time who really understood the significance of the national spirit.
Southern men, smarting under reconstruction governments and bitter with
the prejudice engendered by the war, had not been able, except in rare cases,
to rise to a national point of view. The sectional spirit was ready
to break out at any time. It was but natural. In the Centennial year
a speaker at the University of Virginia said: "Not space, or time,
or the convenience of any human arm, can reconcile institutions
for the turbulent fanatic of Plymouth Rock and the God-fearing Christian
of Jamestown. . . . You may assign them to the closest territorial proximity,
with all the forms, modes, and shows of civilization,
but you can never cement them into the bonds of brotherhood.
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