shadows on the windows at
night, the little girl with her pail of whortleberries, the passing
bee, bird, butterfly, the clouds, the streams, the trees--all found
his mind open to any suggestion they might make. He is intent on the
now and the here. He listens to every newcomer with an expectant air.
He is full of the present. I once saw him at West Point during the
June examinations. How alert and eager he was! The bored and
perfunctory air of his fellow members on the Board of Visitors
contrasted sharply with his active, expectant interest.

V

He lived absolutely in his own day and generation, and no contemporary
writer of real worth escaped his notice. He is never lavish in his
praise, but is for the most part just and discriminating. Walt
Whitman is mentioned only thrice in the Journals, Lowell only twice,
Longfellow once or twice, Matthew Arnold three times, but Jones Very
is quoted and discussed sixteen times. Very was a poet who had no fast
colors; he has quite faded out in our day.

Of Matthew Arnold Emerson says: "I should like to call attention to
the critical superiority of Arnold, his excellent ear for style, and
the singular poverty of his poetry, that in fact he has written but
one poem, 'Thyrsis,' and that on an inspiration borrowed from Milton."
Few good readers, I think, will agree with Emerson about the poverty
of Arnold's poetry. His "Dover Beach" is one of the first-rate poems
in English literature. Emerson has words of praise for Lowell--thinks
the production of such a man "a certificate of good elements in the
soil, climate, and institutions of America," but in 1868 he declares
that his new poems show an advance "in talent rather than in poetic
tone"; that the advance "rather expresses his wish, his ambition, than
the uncontrollable interior impulse which is the authentic mark of a
new poem, and which is unanalysable, and makes the merit of an ode of
Collins, or Gray, or Wordsworth, or Herbert, or Byron." He evidently
thought little of Lowell's severe arraignment of him in a college poem
which he wrote soon after the delivery of the famous "Divinity School
Address." The current of religious feeling in Cambridge set so
strongly against Emerson for several years that Lowell doubtless
merely reflected it. Why did he not try to deflect it, or to check it?
And yet, when Emerson's friends did try to defend him, it was against
his will. He hated to be defended in a newspaper: "As long as all that
is s