the cabin wall or the woodland path is of the same poetic value as the
marble of the ruined temple or the stone of the crumbling castle. His
singularly creative fancy breathes a soul into every scene; his touch
leaves everything that was dull to the sense before glowing in the light
of joyful recognition. He classifies his poems by different names, and
they are of different themes, but they are after all of that unity which I
have been trying, all too shirkingly, to suggest. One, for instance, is
the pathetic story which tells itself in the lyrical eclogue "One Day and
Another." It is the conversation, prolonged from meeting to meeting,
between two lovers whom death parts; but who recurrently find themselves
and each other in the gardens and the woods, and on the waters which they
tell each other of and together delight in. The effect is that which is
truest to youth and love, for these transmutations of emotion form the
disguise of self which makes passion tolerable; but mechanically the
result is a series of nature poems. More genuinely dramatic are such
pieces as "The Feud," "Ku Klux," and "The Lynchers," three out of many;
but one which I value more because it is worthy of Wordsworth, or of
Tennyson in a Wordsworthian mood, is "The Old Mill," where, with all the
wonted charm of his landscape art, Mr. Cawein gives us a strongly local
and novel piece of character painting.

I deny myself with increasing reluctance the pleasure of quoting the
stanzas, the verses, the phrases, the epithets, which lure me by scores
and hundreds in his poems. It must suffice me to say that I do not know
any poem of his which has not some such a felicity; I do not know any poem
of his which is not worth reading, at least the first time, and often the
second and the third time, and so on as often as you have the chance of
recurring to it. Some disappoint and others delight more than others; but
there is none but in greater or less measure has the witchery native to
the poet, and his place and his period.