The Poet came to the land of the East When spring was in the air: The Earth was dressed for a wedding feast, So young she seemed and fair; And the Poet knew the land of the East-- His soul was native there. * * * * * And further sang the Nightingale: _Your_ bower not distant lies. I hear the sound of a Persian lute From the jasmined window rise, And, twin-bright stars, through the lattice bars, I saw the Sultana's eyes. The Poet said: I will here abide, In the Sun's unclouded door; Here are the wells of all delight On the lost Arcadian shore: Here is the light on sea and land, And the dream deceives no more. "Taylor, Boker, Stoddard, Read, Story, and their allies," confessed Stedman in his later years, "wrote poetry for the sheer love of it. They did much beautiful work, with a cosmopolitan and artistic bent, making it a part of the varied industry of men of letters; in fact, they were creating a civic Arcadia of their own."[72] But in making this civic Arcadia of their own they deliberately neglected the opportunity of reacting upon the actual civic life of their own land in their own and later times. They lived in one of the great germinal periods in the history of the race and they deliberately chose to create a little Arcadia of their own. No man of the century, save Lowell, was given the opportunity to react upon the new world of America at a critical moment such as was given to Taylor at the Centennial in 1876. Subject and occasion there were worthy of a Milton. A new America had arisen from the ashes of the war, eager and impetuous. A new era had begun whose glories we of a later century are just beginning to realize. Who was to voice that era? The land needed a poet, a seer, a prophet, and in Taylor it had only a dreamer of beauty, gorgeous of epithet, musical, sensuous. "The National Ode," when we think of what the occasion demanded, must be classed as one of the greatest failures in the history of American literature. Freneau's "The Rising Glory of America," written in 1772, is an incomparably better ode. There are no lines in Taylor's poem to grip the heart and send the blood into quicker beat; there are no magnificent climaxes as in Lowell's odes: Virginia gave us this imperial man. Mother of States and undiminished men, Thou gavest us a country giving him. New birth of our new soil, the first American.