leave us to our precipitation, our catastrophe.

It was surely nothing less than by a catastrophe that I should have been
so betrayed in the volumes of Mr. Cawein's verse which reached me last
before the volume of his collected poems.... I had read his poetry and
loved it from the beginning, and in each successive expression of it, I
had delighted in its expanding and maturing beauty. I believe I had not
failed to own its compass, and when--

"He touched the tender stops of various quills,"

I had responded to every note of the changing music. I did not always
respond audibly either in public or in private, for it seemed to me that
so old a friend might fairly rest on the laurels he had helped bestow. But
when that last volume came, I said to myself, "This applausive silence has
gone on long enough. It is time to break it with open appreciation.
Still," I said, "I must guard against too great appreciation; I must mix
in a little depreciation, to show that I have read attentively,
critically, authoritatively." So I applied myself to the cheapest and
easiest means of depreciation, and asked, "Why do you always write Nature
poems? Why not Human Nature poems?" or the like. But in seizing upon an
objection so obvious that I ought to have known it was superficial, I had
wronged a poet, who had never done me harm, but only good, in the very
terms and conditions of his being a poet. I had not stayed to see that his
nature poetry was instinct with human poetry, with _his_ human poetry,
with mine, with yours. I had made his reproach what ought to have been his
finest praise, what is always the praise of poetry when it is not
artificial and formal. I ought to have said, as I had seen, that not one
of his lovely landscapes in which I could discover no human figure, but
thrilled with a human presence penetrating to it from his most sensitive