For the greater part these later poets were children of the new era who with Whitman voiced their own hearts and looked at the life close about them with their own eyes. The more individual of them, the leading innovators who most impressed themselves upon their times--Whitman, Hay and Harte, Miller, Lanier and Russell--we have already considered. They rose above conventions and rules and looked only at life; they stood for the new Americanism of the period, and they had the courage that dared in a critical and fastidious age to break away into what seemed like crude and unpoetic regions. Not many of them could go to the extremes of Whitman, or even of Harte and Hay. Some would voice the new message of the times in the old key and the old forms; others would adopt the new fashions but change not at all the old themes and the old sentiments. Of the latter class Will Carleton perhaps is the typical representative. By birth and training he belonged to the Western group of innovators represented by Mark Twain and Eggleston and Miller. He had been born in a log cabin in Michigan and he had spent all of his boyhood on a small, secluded farm. He had broken from his environment at twenty, had gained a college degree, and following the lead of his inclination had become a journalist, first in Detroit, then in Chicago, Boston, and New York. From journalism, especially in the seventies, it was but a step to literature. He would be a poet, and led by the spirit of his period he turned for material to the homely life of his boyhood. He would make no realistic picture--no man was ever less fitted than he to reproduce the external features of a scene or a region--he would touch the sentiments and the emotions. "Betsey and I Are Out," published in the _Toledo Blade_ in 1871, was the beginning. Then in 1873 came _Farm Ballads_, with such popular favorites as "Over the Hills to the Poor-House" and "Gone with a Handsomer Man," a thin book that sold forty thousand copies in eighteen months. No poet since Longfellow had so appealed to the common people. At his death in 1912 there had been sold of his various collections more than six hundred thousand copies. His poetry as we read it to-day has in it little of distinction; it is crude, for the most part, and conventional. It made its appeal largely because of its kindly sympathy, its homeliness, and its lavish sentiment. The poet played upon the chords of memory and home and childhood, the message of the earlier Longfellow cast into a heavily stressed and swinging melody that found a prepared audience. With E. P. Roe, his counterpart in prose, Will Carleton is largely responsible for prolonging the age of sentiment.