ing and
maturing beauty. Between the earliest and the latest thing there may
have been a hundred different things in the swan-like life of a singer
... but we take the latest as if it summed him up in motive and range
and tendency.... Not one of his lovely landscapes but thrilled with a
human presence penetrating to it from his most sensitive and subtle
spirit until it was all but painfully alive with memories, with regrets,
with longings, with hopes, with all that from time to time mutably
constitutes us men and women, and yet keeps us children. He has the
gift, in a measure, that I do not think surpassed in any poet, of
touching some commonest thing in nature, and making it live, from the
manifold associations in which we have our being, and glow thereafter
with an indistinguishable beauty.... No other poet can outword this poet
when it comes to choosing some epithet fresh from the earth and air, and
with the morning sun and light upon it, for an emotion or an experience
in which the race renews its youth from generation to generation.... His
touch leaves everything that was dull to the sense before glowing in the
light of joyful recognition."

With a tone of conviction Edwin Markham says:

"No other poet of the later American choir offers so large a collection
of verse as Mr. Cawein does, and no other American minstrel has so
unvarying a devotion to nature. And none other, perhaps, has so keen an
eye, so sure a word for nature's magic of mood, her trick of color, her
change of form. He is not so wild and far-flying as Bliss Carmen, nor so
large and elemental as Joaquin Miller; but he is often as delicate and
eerie as Aldrich, and sometimes as warm and rich as Keats in the April
affluence of 'Endymion.'"

"Mr. Cawein's landscape is not the sea, nor the desert, nor the
mountain, but the lovely inland levels of his Kentucky. His work is
almost wholly objective. A dash more of human import mixed into the
beauty and melody of his poetry would rank him with Lowell and the other
great lyrists of our elder choir."

Some of the new poems portray a high moral passion, potent with the
belief of life beyond, where his delicacy of vision penetrates the
shadow and seems to have sighted the shore that has given his soul
greeting "somewhere yonder in a world uncharted."

Clear, sure, and strong is the vocal loveliness and inevitable word with
which this poet endears the little forms of life in the field of Faery.
The "Song of