I20 AI^KXANDER W11S0T<! '. POE^T-NATURAUST 



brought devotion to his beloved poetry and the 

 chance of a reputation. But we cannot blame 

 such fearlessness when we remember that it was 

 this also that sent him across the Atlantic and at 

 last led him, by a new path, to the goal for which 

 he so ardently longed. There were other causes, 

 too, which united with this thirst for fame to lead 

 him Galahad-like upon his two searches for his 

 "holy-grail." There seemed to have been born 

 in him a love for roving and a devotion to nature 

 and animals which was at last to master and con- 

 trol all other passions of his life. Through all 

 his wanderings — were he gloomy or glad — never 

 did he forget to listen to the songs of the birds, 

 nor was he ever too sordid or weary to turn from 

 his trail to view the beauties of nature ; to him life 

 without the birds, the flowers, and the glorious 

 heavens wasn't really life after all. In his earliest 

 writings there is an honest candor, a love of truth 

 and fair dealing, and a hatred of artificiality and 

 falsehood that "are unmistakably real and sincere. 

 Save in his darkest hours of despondency when 

 nothing looked bright to him, he saw life with 

 wide-open, far-seeing eyes that looked at every- 

 thing in a broad, wholesome way. 



Toward his brother poets, as in later life to his 

 fellow naturalists, there is never, even in his most 

 confidential letters, the least tinge of envy, but 

 his nature is in this respect as free and open as 

 the blue sky above his beloved American fields. 

 Yet his character has not received the refining 

 of suffering and experience that is to come to it 

 with the passing years. He is a little over self- 



