have
had pastorals of which Virgil and Theocritus would have envied him the
authorship, had they chanced to be his contemporaries. As it is, he has
come nearer the antique spirit than any of our native poets, and touched
the fields and groves and streams of his native town with a classic
interest that shall not fade. Some of his verses are suffused with an
elegiac tenderness, as if the woods and fields bewailed the absence
of their forester, and murmured their griefs meanwhile to one
another,--responsive like idyls. Living in close companionship with
Nature, his Muse breathes the spirit and voice of poetry; his excellence
lying herein: for when the heart is once divorced from the senses and
all sympathy with common things, then poetry has fled, and the love that
sings.

The most welcome of companions, this plain countryman. One shall not
meet with thoughts invigorating like his often; coming so scented of
mountain and field breezes and rippling springs, so like a luxuriant
clod from under forest-leaves, moist and mossy with earth-spirits. His
presence is tonic, like ice-water in dog-days to the parched citizen
pent in chambers and under brazen ceilings. Welcome as the gurgle of
brooks, the dripping of pitchers,--then drink and be cool! He seems one
with things, of Nature's essence and core, knit of strong timbers, most
like a wood and its inhabitants. There are in him sod and shade, woods
and waters manifold, the mould and mist of earth and sky. Self-poised
and sagacious as any denizen of the elements, he has the key to every
animal's brain, every plant, every shrub; and were an Indian to flower
forth, and reveal the secrets hidden in his cranium, it would not be
more surprising than the speech of our Sylvanus. He must belong to the
Homeric age,--is older than pastures and gardens, as if he were of the
race of heroes, and one with the elements. He, of all men, seems to be
the native New-Englander, as much so as the oak, the granite ledge, our
best sample of an indigenous American, untouched by the Old Country,
unless he came down from Thor, the Northman; as yet unfathered by any,
and a nondescript in the books of natural history.

A peripatetic philosopher, and out of doors for the best parts of his
days and nights, he has manifold weather and seasons in him, and the
manners of an animal of probity and virtues unstained. Of our moralists
he seems the wholesomest; and the best republican citizen in the
world,--always a