24 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



healthful manhood that we have no longer the childish and neuralgic 

 sensitiveness we manifested under the searching criticism of a gifted son 

 from the sister-university on the Isis ? Such critics as Matthew Arnold 

 and Mr. Dickinson must help us to receive "the spirit of the world that 

 created manners, laws, rehgion, and art — ^which is hovering even now at 

 our gates in quest of a new and more perfect incarnation." Well will it 

 be for us, and for the world at large, if this incarnation is achieved while 

 our nation is yet young and time itself has not grown old. 



For a consideration of Mr. Dickinson's style per se we have little space 

 remaining. However, the foregoing quotations have spoken for them- 

 selves, and we may limit our excerpts to one example of simple descrip- 

 tion, perhaps the most difficult form of artistically effective prose. It is 

 introduced by the author in partial answer to the query as to what man- 

 ner of men these Orientals are. 



Far away in the East, under sunshine such as you never saw (for even such light 

 as you have you stain and infect with sooty smoke), on the shore of a broad river, 

 stands the house where I was born. It is one among thousands; but every one stands 

 in its own garden, simply painted in white or gray, modest, cheerful, and clean. For 

 many miles along the valley, one after the other, they lift their blue or red-tiled roof 

 out of a sea of green; while here and there glitters out over a clump of trees the gold 

 enamel of some tall pagoda. The river, crossed by frequent bridges and crowded 

 with barges and junks, bears on its clear stream the traffic of thriving village -markets. 

 For prosperous peasants people all the district, owning and tilling the fields their 

 fathers owned and tilled before them. The soil on which they work, they may say, 

 they and their ancestors have made. For see! almost to the summit what once 

 were barren hills are waving green with cotton and rice, sugar, oranges, and tea. 

 Water drawn from the river-bed girdles the slopes with silver; and falling from channel 

 to channel in a thousand bright cascades, plashing in cisterns, chuckling in pipes, 

 soaking and oozing in the soil, distributes freely to all alike fertihty, verdure, and life. 

 Hour after hour you may traverse, by tortuous paths, over tiny bridges, the works 

 of the generations who have passed, the labors of their children of today; till you 

 reach the point where man succumbs and Nature has her way, covering the highest 

 crags with a mantle of azure and gold and rose, gardenia, clematis, azalia, growing 

 luxuriantly wild. How often here have I sat for hours in a silence so intense that, 

 as one of our poets has said, "you may hear the shadows of the trees rustling on the 

 ground;" a silence broken only now and again from far below by voices of laborers 

 calling across the water-courses, or, at evening or dawn, by the sound of gongs 

 summoning to worship from the temples in the valley. Such silence! Such sounds! 



