14 REV. JONES VERY, IN MEMORIAM ; 



Very's sensibility is what makes him ; devout sensibility. 

 It has never been excelled, perhaps never equalled. He 

 is as near to God as anybody ever was. Fra Angelico is 

 the only man with a gift of beauty who is like him. 

 Mystics do not always have it. These two men are artists 

 superadded. Puritanism did not admit of art. It chilled 

 the blood. It had a sterner task. Milton struck his 

 roots into Elizabethan soil. Thirty years later he would 

 not have been Milton. 



Very is the least indebted, the most under! ved. When 

 a poet is a poet in grain, as he was, and such winnowed 

 fine grain, we can dispense with the flourishes. One 

 alive to the essence and atmosphere of genius feels it the 

 moment one reads him. One noble man, Whittier, is an 

 instance of purely literary style, diction. Very, not an 

 atom. 



His verse is gentle like the pattering of rain, purling of 

 brooks, or chirping of robins, voices of nature, uncon- 

 scious, as pure, as sweet. A perfect inner voice in liter- 

 ature, not a thought of effect. His pieces write themselves, 

 are produced through him by the spirit. He would return 

 from this communion and write them, unique in our 

 literature, secondary and derivative as it is. He is phe- 

 nomenal, a psychologic study. The transcendental wave 

 which lifted, left him, and he never after came to his 

 own. 



A little literary gift is a wonder here and the writer 

 generally has a cheap alliterative name. The country is 

 full of small fry like white bait. We are children tickled 

 with a straw. Talent shines provincially because we are 

 all provincial, the whole country and nothing more so 

 than New England, this little peninsula jutting out into 

 the Atlantic and longing to join the mother country again 

 and be tucked under her apron strings. Older nations 

 know what genius is, we believe smartness is genius, as 



