tman's want
of art, or his violation of art. I saw that he at once designedly swept
away all which the said critics have commonly meant by that term. The
dominant impression was of the living presence and voice. He would have
no curtains, he said, not the finest, between himself and his reader;
and in thus bringing me face to face with his subject I perceived he
not only did not escape conventional art, but I perceived an enlarged,
enfranchised art in this very abnegation of art. "When half-gods go,
whole gods arrive." It was obvious to me that the new style gained more
than it lost, and that in this fullest operatic launching forth of the
voice, though it sounded strange at first, and required the ear to get
used to it, there might be quite as much science, and a good deal more
power, than in the tuneful but constricted measures we were accustomed
to.

To the eye the page of the new poet presented about the same contrast
with the page of the popular poets that trees and the free, unbidden
growths of nature do with a carefully clipped hedge; and to the spirit
the contrast was about the same. The hedge is the more studiedly and
obviously beautiful, but, ah! there is a kind of beauty and satisfaction
in trees that one would not care to lose. There are symmetry and
proportion in the sonnet, but to me there is something I would not
exchange for them in the wild swing and balance of many free and
unrhymed passages in Shakespeare; like the one, for instance, in which
these lines occur:--

"To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round
About the pendent world."

Here is the spontaneous grace and symmetry of a forest tree, or a
soughing mass of foliage.

And this passage from my poet I do not think could be improved by the
verse-maker's art:--

"This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded
heaven,
And I said to my Spirit, _When we become the enfolders of those orbs
and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be
fill'd and satisfied then?_
And my Spirit said, No, _we but level that lift, to pass and continue
beyond."_

Such breaking with the routine poetic, and with the grammar of verse,
was of course a dangerous experiment, and threw the composer absolutely
upon his intrinsic merits, upon his innately poetic and rhythmic
quality. He must stand or fall by these alone, since he discarded all
artificia