farther from the didactic mood in which "communion with the various forms"
of nature casts the Puritanic soul of Bryant, than the mood in which this
German-blooded, Kentucky-born poet, who keeps throughout his song the
sense of a perpetual and inalienable youth, with a spirit as pagan as that
which breathes from Greek sculpture--but happily not more pagan. Most
modern poets who are antique are rather over-Hellenic, in their wish not
to be English or French, but there is nothing voluntary in Mr. Cawein's
naturalization in the older world of myth and fable; he is too sincerely
and solely a poet to be a _posseur;_ he has his eyes everywhere except on
the spectator, and his affair is to report the beauty that he sees, as if
there were no one by to hear.

An interesting and charming trait of his poetry is its constant theme of
youth and its limit within the range that the emotions and aspirations of
youth take. He might indeed be called the poet of youth if he resented
being called the poet of nature; but the poet of youth, be it understood,
of vague regrets, of "tears, idle tears," of "long, long thoughts," for
that is the real youth, and not the youth of the supposed hilarity, the
attributive recklessness, the daring hopes. Perhaps there is some such
youth as this, but it has not its home in the breast of any young poet,
and he rarely utters it; at best he is of a light melancholy, a smiling
wistfulness, and upon the whole, October is more to his mind than May.

In Mr. Cawein's work, therefore, what is not the expression of the world
we vainly and rashly call the inanimate world, is the hardly more
dramatized, and not more enchantingly imagined story of lovers, rather
unhappy lovers. He finds his own in this sort far and near; in classic
Greece, in heroic England, in romantic Germany, where the blue flower
blows, but not less in beautiful and familiar Kentucky, where the blue
grass shows itself equally the emblem of poetry, and the moldering log in