towards
the crows cawing high above me, cawing back to them, and half wishing I
too were a crow to make the sky ring with my glee.

After Dr. Watts's hymns the first poetry I took great delight in
greeted me upon the pages of the "American First Class Book," handed
down from older pupils in the little private school which my sisters
and I attended when Aunt Hannah had done all she could for us. That
book was a collection of excellent literary extracts, made by one who
was himself an author and a poet. It deserved to be called
"first-class" in another sense than that which was understood by its
title. I cannot think that modern reading books have improved upon it
much. It contained poems from Wordsworth, passages from Shakespeare's
plays, among them the pathetic dialogue between Hubert and little
Prince Arthur, whose appeal to have his eyes spared, brought many a
tear to my own. Bryant's "Waterfowl" and "Thanatopsis" were there also;
and Neal's,--

"There's a fierce gray bird with a bending beak,"

that the boys loved so dearly to "declaim;" and another poem by this
last author, which we all liked to read, partly from a childish love of
the tragic, and partly for its graphic description of an avalanche's
movement:--

"Slowly it came in its mountain wrath,
And the forests vanished before its path;
And the rude cliffs bowed; and the waters fled,--
And the valley of life was the tomb of the dead."

In reading this, "Swiss Minstrel's Lament over the Ruins of Goldau," I
first felt my imagination thrilled with the terrible beauty of the
mountains--a terror and a sublimity which attracted my thoughts far
more than it awed them. But the poem in which they burst upon me as
real presences, unseen, yet known in their remote splendor as kingly
friends before whom I could bow, yet with whom I could aspire,--for
something like this I think mountains must always be to those who truly
love them,--was Coleridge's "Mont Blanc before Sunrise," in this same
"First Class Book." I believe that poetry really first took possession
of me in that poem, so that afterwards I could not easily mistake the
genuineness of its ring, though my ear might not be sufficiently
trained to catch its subtler harmonies. This great mountain poem struck
some hidden key-note in my nature, and I knew thenceforth something of
what it was to live in poetry, and to have it live in me. Of course I
did not consider my own foolish little versifying poetry