book as a whole I could form no adequate conception, and
it was not for many years, and after I had known the poet himself, as
already stated, that I saw in it a teeming, rushing globe well worthy my
best days and strength to surround and comprehend.

One thing that early took me in the poems was (as before alluded to) the
tremendous personal force back of them, and felt through them as the
sun through vapor; not merely intellectual grasp or push, but a warm,
breathing, towering, magnetic Presence that there was no escape from.

Another fact I was quick to perceive, namely, that this man had almost
in excess a quality in which every current poet was lacking,--I mean the
faculty of being in entire sympathy with actual nature, and the objects;
and shows of nature, and of rude, abysmal man; and appalling directness
of utterance therefrom, at first hand, without any intermediate agency
or modification.

The influence of books and works of art upon an author may be seen in
all respectable writers. If knowledge alone made literature, or culture
genius, there would be no dearth of these things among the moderns. But
I feel bound to say that there is something higher and deeper than the
influence or perusal of any or all books, or all other productions of
genius,--a quality of information which the masters can never impart,
and which all the libraries do not hold. This is the absorption by an
author, previous to becoming so, of the spirit of nature, through
the visible objects of the universe, and his affiliation with them
subjectively and objectively. Not more surely is the blood quickened and
purified by contact with the unbreathed air than is the spirit of man
vitalized and made strong by intercourse with the real things of the
earth. The calm, all-permitting, wordless spirit of nature,--yet so
eloquent to him who hath ears to hear! The sunrise, the heaving sea,
the woods and mountains, the storm and the whistling winds, the gentle
summer day, the winter sights and sounds, the night and the high dome of
stars,--to have really perused these, especially from childhood onward,
till what there is in them, so impossible to define, finds its full mate
and echo in the mind,--this only is the lore which breathes the breath
of life into all the rest. Without it, literary productions may have the
superb beauty of statues, but with it only can they have the beauty of
life.

I was never troubled at all by what the critics called Whi