and subtle spirit until it was all but painfully alive with memories, with
regrets, with longings, with hopes, with all that from time to time
mutably constitutes us men and women, and yet keeps us children. He has
the gift, in a measure that I do not think surpassed in any poet, of
touching some smallest or commonest thing in nature, and making it live
from the manifold associations in which we have our being, and glow
thereafter with an inextinguishable beauty. His felicities do not seem
sought; rather they seem to seek him, and to surprise him with the delight
they impart through him. He has the inspiration of the right word, and the
courage of it, so that though in the first instant you may be challenged,
you may be revolted, by something that you might have thought uncouth, you
are presently overcome by the happy bravery of it, and gladly recognize
that no other word of those verbal saints or aristocrats, dedicated to the
worship or service of beauty, would at all so well have conveyed the sense
of it as this or that plebeian.

If I began indulging myself in the pleasure of quotation, or the delight
of giving proofs of what I say, I should soon and far transcend the modest
bounds which the editor has set my paper. But the reader may take it from
me that no other poet, not even of the great Elizabethan range, can
outword this poet when it comes to choosing some epithet fresh from the
earth or air, and with the morning sun or light upon it, for an emotion or
experience in which the race renews its youth from generation to
generation. He is of the kind of Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth and
Coleridge, in that truth to observance and experience of nature and the
joyous expression of it, which are the dominant characteristics of his
art. It is imaginable that the thinness of the social life in the Middle
West threw the poet upon the communion with the fields and woods, the days
and nights, the changing seasons, in which another great nature poet of
ours declares they "speak in various language." But nothing could be