greatly to the amusement of some of the actors, when the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 swept through Port Gibson. Reed. Carroll, and others had not then drawn the fangs of this yellow peril, and its appearance was the signal for an immediate flight. In the resulting confusion all lines of the play were lost, and the only trace that I have been able to find is Mrs. F. C. Englesing's (Miss Sallie Williams') statement that all she remembers of the play and her part therein is that, in order to bring about an interruption at a certain point, she had to rush in waving a head handkerchief and shouting, "The cows are in the gyarden and have et up all the 'mattuses," a line upon which it would be unsafe to predict any extended dramatic career for its author.

Upon the outbreak of the fever all the inhabitants of Port Gibson who could afford to do so, promptly "refugeed,” but Irwin and Dr. Russell stayed in the town to nurse the sick. In his letters of this period Russell gives a vivid account of what his father and he endured. "All of us are well worn out, nursing; yet we cannot nurse the sick properly, there are so many of them, and many die for want of attention. It is horrible here, you cannot conceive how horrible. Of all who have died here, not one has had any sort of funeral. Rich or poor, there is no difference. As soon as the breath leaves them, they are boxed up in pine coffins and buried without the least ceremony of any kind, and nobody to follow them to the grave." "Four days ago, I, for the first time. in a month, sat down to a regularly cooked and served meal. *** Happily the epidemic is nearly over in the town for want of material. Between six hundred and seven hundred people (out of sixteen hundred) remained in town to face the fever. Out of these there have been five hundred and seventy cases and one hundred and eighteen deaths up to this date. I will not attempt to give you an idea of the awful horrors I have seen, among which I have lived for the past five or six weeks."

The recent discovery of the list of dead which Russell and J. S. Mason, Jr., compiled on September 28, 1878, fortunately

enables us to check the statistics just quoted. According to this list there had been 570 cases and 112 deaths (60 white, 52 colored). When the fever had run its course there had been about 350 deaths in the town and county.

The material which he worked into his poem "Along the Line," he got at first hand.

The air got full o' the fever; grass growed up in the street.
Travel the town all over, and never a man you'd meet,

'Cept, maybe, some feller a-runnin', who'd say, as he passed you by,

"I'm tryin' to find the doctor," or "Billy is bound to die."

When folks went under-they might be the very best in the land

We throwed 'em into a white-pine box and drayed 'em out offhand To wait their turn to be planted, without a word or a prayerThere wa'n't no chance and there wa'nt no time for prayin' or preachin' there.

Evidence, however, that Russell was better than his own words is given by Dr. Mounger, who worked side by side with Russell during the epidemic and who bears testimony to Russell's heroism during this period. "When the fever spread in the county and there was an entire lack of physicians and nurses in some sections, he went out *** and made himself most useful. He cared for and nursed those who had the fever, and when they died, he assisted in digging graves, for there were few to do such work, and in one instance which I heard of, as there was no minister in reach, he read the burial service of the church and committed the dead man to the grave. He did everything that he could or that any one could, was most sympathetic and helpful, and self-sacrificing to the largest degree."

The following incident, which has until now remained unpublished, confirms both the description of the epidemic which Russell gives in his letters and Dr. Mounger's account of Russell's work at that time. A woman living outside the town in one day lost her entire family, consisting of her husband

and her two children. No one dared go near her home to help her except Russell, and they two alone were forced to dig the three graves and bury the dead. Another incident which, though not related to the fever epidemic, illustrates better than anything else could, Russell's sympathy and tenderness is told in the following quotation from a personal letter which I have just received: "One of Dr. Russell's patients lost her little baby only a few hours old, and asked Dr. Russell to allow her to keep the little body by her side over night, as she could not bear to think of its being alone. Dr. Russell refused. He happened to mention her request at his supper table. Irwin at once arose, went to the house, and after sending word to the mother not to worry, that he would take care of the baby for her, sat beside it all night." It is not strange that he made friends everywhere he went.

It was during the epidemic of 1878 that he "read for the first time Shelley's 'Peter Bell,' in which occurs what he declared to be an absolutely accurate description of the effects of yellow fever:

"Came a spasm

And wrenched his gnashing teeth asunder;
Like one who sees a strange phantasm

He lay, there was a silent chasm
Between his upper jaw and under.

This he never tired of repeating. The ghastly picture seemed to have a fascination for him, and profoundly influenced the subsequent year or so of his life. He could not escape wholly from the awful scenes through which he had passed, by which he had lost many dear friends, including the one on whom his affections were fixed and his happiness depended." *

Local tradition has added somewhat to Mr. Marble's state

*C. C. Marble, The Critic, November 3, 1888.

ment in regard to Russell's sweetheart. According to this source of information, his sweetheart was a Miss Dora Donald. Russell met her while she was visiting in Port Gibson and fell deeply in love with her. But Miss Donald was poor and somewhat below his station in life, and the Russells thought that she was scarcely good enough for him and therefore broke off the match. He was true to her memory and never loved any one else.

Slight as are these notes, if they serve no other purpose than to call renewed attention to this other Lycidas who perished ere his prime, I shall not have recorded them in vain. That Russell is comparatively unknown and his influence upon Southern literature unrecognized, is more to our discredit than to his. "To travel hopefully is better than to arrive,' as Stevenson says; and in the following sentences from "Aes Triplex" he expresses perfectly the significance of the broken arc of Russell's life and work: "It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which outlives the most untimely ending. All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind."

THE SONNET IN TEXAS LITERATURE

BY DAVIS FOUTE EAGLETON

The sonnet is a poetic form of conscious literary art more disposed to the reflective than to the song type of the lyric. It had its beginnings probably in Sicily as early as the twelfth century, having been evolved from an Arabic or an old Greek form. Spreading rapidly over western and northern Europe, it was introduced into England in the middle of the sixteenth century. It belongs to the poetry of culture. In structure and composition it has its definite features: a stanza of fourteen lines, combined by a single sentiment and definite rhyme scheme. Generally speaking, the sentiment is presented from two points of view: first, in the guise of a figure, image, or parallel, which is designated as the octette; then in a resolution or application.

There are three well defined forms of structure. The Italian is divided into octette and sestette, of decasyllabic iambics, having four differing vowel sounds, with the prevailing rhyme scheme: abba, abba, ed, cd, cd. Petrarch, Wordsworth, and Milton furnish good examples. The Shakespearian sonnet, the expression of the romanticism of the Elizabethan period, is divided into three quatrains, with a closing couplet, instead of octette and sestette. The rhyme scheme is usually abab, eded, efef, gg. Spenser and Shakespeare, with many later poets, used it extensively. The third is the recent or modern sonnet, which is a variant of the other two, and is designed to represent the undulations of life experiences, as it were, or the rise and fall of the sea billow, or the alternation of day and night, or of summer and winter. The sentiment and verse rise together in the first division, and recede together in the second. The later poets furnish abundant examples.

Theodore Watts, in a "metrical lesson by the sea-shore,"