FIELD AND STUDY 



science generally in a large and free way, not to 

 convey information, but to stimulate the poetic 

 sense. His treatment is synthetic and not analytic. 

 Every cloud that floats above him "writes a letter 

 in his book," but these things are not ends in them- 

 selves, they are but the colors upon his palette. 

 The picture he paints is not in nature, but in his 

 own soul. He uses objects in nature to figure forth 

 a mood of the soul, not for the flower's or the bird's 

 sake, but to fathom the sense of solitude in the 

 spirit. Such poems express a sympathy with nature 

 that was quite alien to the ancient mind. 







Shall we ever again have a group of poets who can 

 deal with nature in the large, virile way in which 

 some of our older poets did, giving us the same sense 

 of reality, stirring the same universal emotions of 

 our common humanity, portraying what we all see 

 and feel but cannot all express, as Bryant did in his 

 "Waterfowl," and several other poems, as Emer- 

 son did in his "Humble-Bee" and "Titmouse," as 

 Burns did with his "Mouse," as Wordsworth did in 

 the "Cuckoo" and the "Daffodils" and in scores 

 of poems, as Whitman did in numerous passages 

 in his large, flowing lines, as Trowbridge did in 

 his "Pewee," and "Mid-Summer," and as Celia 

 Thaxter did in her "Sandpiper"? 



I recall but one of our current poets who has 

 touched a nature theme in the old, felicitous, and, 

 222 



