e mode of thinking.... What I call poetry,
has nothing to do with art or learning. It is a natural music, the
music of woods and waters, not that of the orchestra.... Poetry is
a religion, as well as a music. Nay, it is eloquence. It is whatever
affects, touches, or disturbs the animal or moral sense of man. I care
not how poetry may be expressed, nor in what language; it is still
poetry; as the melody of the waters, wherever they may run, in the
desert or the wilderness, among the rocks or the grass, will always be
melody.... It is not the composition of a master, the language of art,
painfully and entirely exact, but is the wild, capricious melody of
nature, pathetic or brilliant, like the roundelay of innumerable birds
whistling all about you, in the wind and water, sky and air, or the
coquetting of a river breeze over the fine string's of an Aeolian harp,
concealed among green, leaves and apple blossoms.

* * * * *

=_John Pendleton Kennedy, 1795-1870._= (Manual, pp. 490, 510.)

From "Swallow Barn."

=_290._= THE MANSION AND THE BARN.

Swallow Barn is an aristocratical old edifice, which sits, like a
brooding hen, on the southern bank of the James River. It looks down
upon a shady pocket, or nook, formed by an indentation of the shore,
from a gentle acclivity, thinly sprinkled with oaks, whose magnificent
branches afford habitation to sundry friendly colonies of squirrels and
woodpeckers.

This time-honored mansion was the residence of the family of Hazards....

The main building is more than a century old. It is built with thick
brick walls, but one story in height, and surmounted by a double-faced
or hipped roof, which gives the idea of a ship, bottom upwards. Later
buildings have been added to this, as the wants or ambition of the
family have expanded. These are all constructed of wood, and seem
to have been built in defiance of all laws of congruity, just as
convenience required....

... Beyond the bridge, at some distance, stands a prominent object in
the perspective of this picture,--the most venerable appendage to the
establishment,--a huge barn, with an immense roof hanging almost to the
ground, and thatched a foot thick with sun-burnt straw, which reaches
below the eaves in ragged flakes. It has a singularly drowsy and
decrepit aspect.

* * * * *

=_291._= A DISAPPOINTED POLITICIAN.

"Things are getting worse and worse," repli