During his earlier life he was in America but not of it. Even the war had little effect upon him. He was inclined to look at life from the standpoint of the aristocrat. He held himself aloof from his generation with little of sympathy for the struggling masses. He was suspicious of democracy: "We shall have bloody work in this country some of these days," he wrote to Woodberry in 1894, "when the lazy _canaille_ get organized. They are the spawn of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville."[80] And again, "Emerson's mind would have been enriched if he could have had more terrapin and less fish-ball." The mighty westward movement in America after the war concerned him not at all. Much in the new literary movement repelled him. He denounced Kipling and declared that he would have rejected the "Recessional" had it been offered to the _Atlantic_. Realism he despised: The mighty Zolaistic Movement now Engrosses us--a miasmatic breath Blown from the slums. We paint life as it is, The hideous side of it, with careful pains Making a god of the dull Commonplace, For have we not the old gods overthrown And set up strangest idols? A poet should be a leader of his generation. He should be in sympathy with it; he should interpret the nation to itself; he should have vision and he should be a compeller of visions. It is not his mission weakly to complain that the old is passing and that the new is strange and worthless. The America of the seventies and the eighties was tremendously alive. It was breaking new areas and organizing a new empire in the West; it was lifting up a splendid new hope for all mankind. It needed a poet, and its poets were looking eastward and singing of the fall of my lady's eyelash. V