sweetest and most facile singers, from Herrick to Swinburne, seem hard
and mechanical by comparison. But there is something more. I doubt, for
one thing, if we are justified in the boast we sometimes make that the
feeling for Nature is stronger in our poets than in those of other
countries. The most scientific critic may be unable to pick a hole in
Tennyson's botany and zoology; but the passion for, and feeling of
oneness with Nature may exist without this modern minute accuracy. Be
this as it may, it was not Tennyson, nor any other of our poets, that I
would have taken to my dreamed-of solitary cabin for companionship:
Melendez came first to my mind. I think of his lines to a butterfly:

De donde alegre vienes
Tan suelta y tan festiva,
Las valles alegrando
Veloz mariposilla?*

* May be roughly rendered thus:

Whence, blithe one, comest thou
With that airy, happy flight--
To make the valleys glad,
O swift-winged butterfly?

and can imagine him--the poet himself--coming to see me through the
woods and down the hill with the careless ease and lightness of heart of
his own purple-winged child of earth and air--_tan suelta y tan
festiva_. Here in these four or five words one may read the whole secret
of his charm--the exquisite delicacy and seeming art-lessness in the
form, and the spirit that is in him--the old, simple, healthy, natural
gladness in nature, and feeling of kinship with all the children of