The Last Harvest

ame, or in which their suggestion lies. Now and then there is quite as good stuff as is found in his printed volumes, pages and paragraphs from the same high heaven of

oism, Manners, Experience, Nature, Immortality, and scores of other related subjects every day, and he presents them in new connections and with new images. His mind had marked centrality, and fundamental problems were always near at hand with him. H

ise sayings from his wide reading, from intercourse with men, private and public, sayings from his farmer neighbors, anecdotes, accounts of his travels, or his walks, solitary or in the company of Channing, Hawthorne,

they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away." In this brief May entry we probabl

hepherd or the beggar in his red cloak little knows what a charm he gives to the wide landscape that charms you on the mountain-top and whereof he

n the field, yon

the hilltop l

g is beautiful alone. Nothing but is beautiful in th

needed by

fair or g

ain." The substance of the next four stanzas is in prose form also: "Thou art shut in thy banks; but the stream I love, flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air, and through darkness, and through men,

y narrow ba

I love un

d and sea an

through life, i

e inundat

spending of

hrough men, thro

thought, through

e man" because he was a mere conjurer with words. The intellectual content of Poe's works was negligible. He was a wizard with words and measures, but a pauper in ideas. He did not add to our knowledge, he did not add to our love of anything in nature or in life, he did not contribute to our contentment in the world-the bread of life was not in him. What was in him was mastery over the architectonics of verse. Emerson saw little in Shelley for the same reason, but much in Herbert and Donne. Religion, in his sense of the term,-the deep sea into which the streams of all human thought empty,-was his final

s very obscure. In an earlier age he would doubtless have remained a preacher, like his father and grandfather, but coming under the influence of Goethe, Carlyle, and Wordsworth, and other liberating influences of the nineteenth century, he was bound to be a writer. When he was but twenty-one he speaks of his