192 BIRDS AND POETS 
And went where he sat on a log, and led him in, and assured 
hin, 
And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and 
bruis’d feet, 
And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him 
some coarse clean clothes ; 
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awk- 
wardness, 
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and 
ankles: 
He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated and 
pass’d North; 
(I had him sit next me at table—my firelock lean’d in the 
corner.) ”’ 
But of the book as a whole I could form no ade- 
quate conception, and it was not till 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, abys- 
mal man; and appalling directness of utterance 
therefrom, at first hand, without any intermediate 
agency or modification. 
