Hamerik's characterization of his flute-playing may be taken as the key to all his work: "The artist felt in his performance the superiority of the _momentary inspiration_ to all the rules and shifts of mere technical scholarship." It explains the unevenness of his work and its lack of finish. He had no patience to return to a poem and labor upon it. Other and more rapturous melodies were calling to him. It explains his lack of constructive power: inspiration is a thing of rapturous glimpses, not of long, patient coördinating effort. His poems are chaotic in structure even to the point often of obscurity. "Corn," for example, was intended to be a poem with a message, and that message doubtless the superiority of corn over cotton as a crop for the new South. But half the poem has only the vaguest connection with the subject. One-third of it outlines the duties and privileges of the poet soul. The message is not brought home: one has to labor to find it. There is a succession of beautiful images expressed often with rare melody and distinction, but inconsecutive even to vagueness. His prose has the same characteristics. The lectures on the English novel seem like the first draft of work rather than like a finished product. He changes his plan as he proceeds. It was to be a study of the novel as a literary form, but as he progresses he changes it into a study of the development of personality in literature, and finally ends it by devoting half his total space to a rhapsody upon George Eliot. _The Science of English Verse_ has the same faults. He rides a pet theory through chapters and dismisses really basic principles with a paragraph. It is a book of magnificent, even at times of inspired sections, but as a complete treatise it has no great value. The same may be said of all his prose work: he had flashes of inspiration but no consecutive message. The cause for it was partly pathological, partly temperamental. He was first of all a musician, a genius, an improvisatore. That his conception of the poet's office was a broader and saner and more modern one than that of most of his contemporaries was undoubtedly true. In "Corn" he addresses thus the stalk that stands high above its fellows: Still shalt thou type the poet-soul sublime That leads the vanward of his timid time And sings up cowards with commanding rime-- Soul calm, like thee, yet fain, like thee, to grow By double increment, above, below; Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee, Teaching the yeomen selfless chivalry. The poet then is not to be a mere dreamer of beauty, a dweller in the clouds apart from the men of his time. He is to stand squarely on the earth: Thou lift'st more stature than a mortal man's, Yet ever piercest downward in the mold And keepest hold Upon the reverend and steadfast earth That gave thee birth.