old man, to whom his verses tell,
All sounds were music, even as a child;
And then the sudden knowledge on me fell,
For all the hours his fancies had beguiled,
No verse had shown the Poet half so well
As when he looked into my face and smiled.
--_Linn Porter_

Friend Whitman! wert thou less serene and kind,
Surely thou mightest (like the bard sublime),
Scorned by a generation deaf and blind,
Make thine appeal to the avenger TIME;
For thou art none of those who upward climb,
Gathering roses with a vacant mind.
Ne'er have thy hands for jaded triflers twined
Sick flowers of rhetoric and weeds of rhyme.
Nay, thine hath been a Prophet's stormier fate.
While LINCOLN and the martyr'd legions wait
In the yet widening blue of yonder sky,
On the great strand below them thou art seen,
Blessing, with something Christ-like in thy mien,
A sea of turbulent lives, that break and die.
--_Robert Buchanan_

Darkness and death? Nay, Pioneer, for thee
The day of deeper vision has begun;
There is no darkness for the central sun
Nor any death for immortality.
At last the song of all fair songs that be,
At last the guerdon of a race well run,
The upswelling joy to know the victory won,
The river's rapture when it finds the sea.
Ah, thou art wrought in an heroic mould,
The Modern Man upon whose brow yet stays
A gleam of glory from the age of gold--
A diadem which all the gods have kissed.
Hail and farewell! Flower of the antique days,
Democracy's divine protagonist.
--_Francis Howard Williams_

Tranquil as stars that unafraid
Pursue their way through space,
Vital as light, unhoused as wind,
Unloosed from time and place;

Solemn as birth, and sane as death,
Thy bardic chantings move;
Rugged as earth, and salt as sea,
And bitter-sweet as love.
--_May Morgan_

One master poet royally her own,
Begot of Freedom, bore our Western World:
A poet, native as the dew impearl'd
Upon her grass; a brother, thew and bone,
To mountains wild, vast lakes and prairies lone;
One, life and soul, akin to speech unfurl'd,
And zeal of artisan, and song not curl'd
In fronded forms, or petrified in tone.
High latitude