o stanzas, the author
had got at the heart of a good deal of America. In another cheap
magazine, professing to be devoted wholly to stories, he hoped for a
breathing-space, and was tasked by nothing less familiar than Swift's
versification of a well-known maxim of La Rouchefoucauld. In a ten-cent
magazine which is too easily the best of that sort, he found two pieces
of uncommon worth, which opened the way so promisingly, indeed, for
happier fortunes that he was not as much surprised as he might later
have been in finding five poems, all good, in one of the four greater,
or at least dearer, magazines. One of these pieces was excellent
landscape, and another a capital nature piece; if a third was somewhat
strained, it was also rather strong, and a fourth had the quiet which it
is hard to know from repose. Two poems in another of the high-priced
magazines were noticeable, one for sound poetic thinking, and the other
as very truthfully pathetic. The two in a cheap magazine, by two
Kentucky poets, a song and a landscape, were one genuinely a song, and
the other a charming communion with nature. In a pair of periodicals
devoted to outdoor life, on the tamer or wilder scale, there were three
poems, one celebrating the delights of a winter camp, which he found
simple, true in feeling, and informal in phrasing; another full of the
joy of a country ride, very songy, very blithe, and original; and a
third a study of scenery which it realized to the mind's eye, with some
straining in the wording, but much felicity in the imagining. A
Mid-Western magazine had an excellent piece by a poet of noted name, who
failed to observe that his poem ended a stanza sooner than he did. In a
periodical devoted to short stories, or abandoned to them, there were
two good pieces, one of them delicately yet distinctly reproducing
certain poetic aspects of New York, and giving the sense of a fresh
talent. Where the critic would hardly have looked for them, in a
magazine of professed fashion and avowed smartness, he came upon three
pieces, one sweet and fine, one wise and good, one fresh and well
turned. A newer periodical, rather going in for literary quality, had
one fine piece, with a pretty surprise in it, and another touched with
imaginative observation.

The researches of the critic carried him far into the night, or at least
hours beyond his bedtime, and in the dreamy mood in which he finally
pursued them he was more interested in certain psycho