What work we set him to.
Laurel, laurel, yes;
He did what we bade him do.
Praise, and never a whispered hint but the fight he fought was good;
Never a word that the blood on his sword was his country's own
heart's-blood.

"A flag for the soldier's bier
Who dies that his land may live;
O, banners, banners here,
That he doubt not nor misgive!
That he heed not from the tomb
The evil days draw near
When the nation, robed in gloom,
With its faithless past shall strive.
Let him never dream that his bullet's scream went wide of its island
mark,
Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in
the dark."

When I say that every true poet must have a philosophy, I do not mean
that he must be what is commonly called a philosophical poet; from
such we steer clear. The philosophy in a poem must be like the iron in
the blood. It is the iron that gives color and vigor to the blood.
Reduce it and we become an anaemic and feeble race. Much of the popular
poetry is anaemic in this respect. There is no virile thought in it.
All of which amounts to saying that there is always a great nature
back of a great poem.

The various forms of verse are skillfully used by an increasing number
of educated persons, but the number of true poets is not increasing.
Quite the contrary, I fear. The spirit of the times in which we live
does not favor meditation and absorption in the basic things out of
which great poetry arises. "The world is too much with us." Yet we
need not be too much discouraged. England has produced Masefield, and
we have produced John Russell McCarthy, who has written the best
nature poetry since Emerson. The genius of a race does not repeat. We
shall never again produce poets of the type of those that are gone,
and we should not want to. All we may hope for is to produce poets as
original and characteristic and genuine as those of the past--poets
who as truly express the spirit of their time, as the greater poets
did of theirs--not Emerson and Whitman over again, but a wide
departure from their types.

Speaking of Whitman, may we not affirm that it is his tremendous and
impassioned philosophy suffusing his work, as the blood suffuses the
body, that keeps "Leaves of Grass" forever fresh? We do not go to
Whitman for pretty flowers of poesy, al