"`If any beat a horse, you felt he saw;
If any cursed a woman, he took note.'
Yet stared at nobody,--you stared at him,
And found, less to your pleasure than surprise,
He seemed to know you, and expect as much."

Popular imagination is active as to who and what he is; perhaps a spy,
or it may be "a recording chief-inquisitor, the town's true master
if the town but knew", who by letters keeps "our Lord the King"
well informed "of all thought, said, and acted"; but of the King's
approval of these letters there has been no evidence of any kind.

The speaker found no truth in one of the popular reports, namely,
that this strange man lived in great luxury and splendor.
On the contrary, he lived in the plainest, simplest manner;
played a game of cribbage with his maid, in the evening, and,
when the church clock struck ten, went straight off to bed.
It seems that while the belief of the people was, that this man
kept up a correspondence with their earthly Lord, the King,
noting all that went on, the speaker, in the monologue is aware
that it was the Heavenly King with whom he corresponded.
In the last paragraph of his monologue he expresses the wish
that he might have looked in, yet had haply been afraid,
when this man came to die, and seen, ministering to him,
the heavenly attendants,--

"who line the clean gay garret sides,
And stood about the neat low truckle-bed
With the heavenly manner of relieving guard.
Here had been, mark, the general-in-chief,
Thro' a whole campaign of the world's life and death,
Doing the King's work all the dim day long,
* * * * *
And, now the day was won, relieved at once!"

He then adds that there was

"`No further show or need of that old coat,
You are sure, for one thing! Bless us, all the while
How sprucely WE are dressed out, you and I!'"

we who are so inferior to that divine poet; but,

"A second, and the angels alter that."

"Transcendentalism".

A poem in twelve books.

This monologue is addressed by a poet to a brother-poet whom
he finds fault with for speaking naked thoughts instead of
draping them in sights and sounds. If boys want images and melody,
grown men, you think, want abstract thought. Far from it.
The objects which throng our youth, we see and hear, quite as a matter
of course. But what of it, if you could tell what they mean?
The