112 East and West 
of the English poets that until lately our 
heads were full of skylarks, nightingales and 
primroses. A Western poet has sung of 
these things—as if the Sierras and the desert, 
the live-oaks and the flower-covered fields 
offered nothing better. Surely we have a 
Lake Country in New York awaiting the 
bard who shall sing the wheat-fields and the 
upland plover, who shall sing these vine- 
covered slopes above the deep cold lakes, 
these secluded glens where fringed polygala 
and cypripedium bloom; awaiting the poet 
in every beholder who sainters in the fields 
or paddles on these blue waters and delights 
his eye with the woods and vineyards, the 
waving grain and the purple hills in the hazy 
distance. 
If we have not the advantage of investing 
our landscape with that seductive glamour of 
association which poetry and history give to 
many places in the Old World, we have the 
compensation of seeing it for ourselves if 
only we can throw over it some rich and poetic 
association of our own minds. Instead of 
endeavouring to feel what Wordsworth or 
Shelley or Keats felt, we may aim to have a 
reaction all our own and to allow the lakes 
and the hills to stimulate us directly and 
