more than beauty, he seeks the perennial source of beauty. The
poet leads man to nature as a mother leads her child there--to instill
a love of it into his heart. If a poet adds neither to my knowledge
nor to my love, of what use is he? For instance, Poe does not make me
know more or love more, but he delights me by his consummate art.
Bryant's long poem "The Ages" has little value, mainly because it is
charged with no philosophy, and no imaginative emotion. His "Lines to
a Waterfowl" will last because of the simple, profound human emotion
they awaken. The poem is marred, however, by the stanza that he tacks
on the end, which strikes a note entirely foreign to the true spirit
of the poem. You cannot by tacking a moral to a poem give it the
philosophical breadth to which I have referred. "Thanatopsis" has a
solemn and majestic music, but not the unique excellence of the
waterfowl poem. Yet it may be generally said of Bryant that he has a
broad human outlook on life and is free from the subtleties and
ingenious refinements of many of our younger poets.

I know of only three poets in this century who bring a large measure
of thought and emotion to their task. I refer to William Vaughn Moody,
to John Russell McCarthy (author of "Out-of-Doors" and "Gods and
Devils"), and to Robert Loveman, best known for his felicitous "Rain
Song," a poem too well known to be quoted here. Any poet who has ever
lived might have been proud to have written that poem. It goes as
lightly as thistle-down, yet is freighted with thought. Its philosophy
is so sublimated and so natural and easy that we are likely to forget
that it has any philosophy at all. The fifty or more stanzas of his
"Gates of Silence" are probably far less well known. Let me quote a
few of them:

"The races rise and fall,
The nations come and go,
Time tenderly doth cover all
With violets and snow.

"The mortal tide moves on
To some immortal shore,
Past purple peaks of dusk and dawn,
Into the evermore.

* * * * *

"All the tomes of all the tribes,
All the songs of all the scribes,
All that priest and prophet say,
What is it? and what are they?

"Fancies futile, feeble, vain,
Idle dream-drift of the brain,--
As of old the mystery
Doth encompass you and me.

* * * * *

"Old and yet young, the jocund Earth
Doth speed among