make a more distinctive use of this activity than other men. He quotes
some of the classic confidences of poets themselves: Keats's "If a sparrow
come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the
gravel"; and Goethe on the sheep pictured by the artist Roos, "I always
feel uneasy when I look at these beasts. Their state, so limited, dull,
gaping, and dreaming, excites in me such sympathy that I fear I shall
become a sheep, and almost think the artist must have been one." I can
match this Goethe story with the prayer of little Larry H., son of an
eminent Harvard biologist. Larry, at the age of six, was taken by his
mother to the top of a Vermont hill-pasture, where, for the first time in
his life, he saw a herd of cows and was thrilled by their glorious bigness
and nearness and novelty. When he said his prayers that night, he was
enough of a poet to change his usual formula into this:

"Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me,
Bless thy little _cow_ to-night"--

_Larry being the cow._

"There was a child went forth every day,"

records Walt Whitman,

"And the first object he look'd upon that object
he became."

Professor Fairchild quotes these lines from Whitman, and a few of the many
passages of the same purport from Coleridge and Wordsworth. They are all
summed up in Coleridge's heart-broken