"free verse" than any one has written since. Poems, such as "Hamatreya," "Woodnotes," "Monadnoc," and "Musketaquid," prove his possession of senses tinglingly responsive to the touches of native color, scent, and sound; show a poetical nature that has struck root and has been richly nourished "in haunts which others scorned." As for his general theory of art, in his more sanguine and exalted moments he goes beyond our most radical leaders in his passion for reconciling art with nature and restoring it to "all the people," so that the ultimate phase of artistic development would be an habitual happy improvisation.
That aspiration, as Emerson would have been the first to admit, was ideal, was Utopian. It could be realized only in a profoundly regenerated and enriched society. In this world as it is at present, he recognized that great poetry, for example, must be the result of special culture and austere discipline. It must therefore be submitted for judgment to the cultivated and the disciplined. He has no immediate intention of accepting the standards of the mob. Our radical anti-critical friends would indeed dispose of him as "academic." For he comforts himself, in the absence of a national Academy, with this reflection, in the second volume of the Journals: "Consider the permanence of the best opinion: the certainty with which a good book acquires fame, though a bad book succeeds better at first. Consider the natural academy which the best heads of the
