A singer of a different type was John James Piatt, born in Indiana in 1835 and joint author with W. D. Howells of _Poems of Two Friends_, 1859. He was a classicist who caught the new vision and sought to compromise. Everywhere in his work a blending of the new and the old: the Western spirit that would voice the new notes of the Wabash rather than echo the old music of the Thames, that syren melody that had been the undoing of Taylor and Stoddard. In an early review of Stedman, Piatt had found, as he characteristically termed it, "a too frequent betrayal of Tennyson's floating musk in his singing-garments," and he had noted as his chief strength that "his representative subjects are American."[140] In making the criticism he touched upon his own weakness and his own strength. In all his volumes conventional work like "Rose and Root," "The Sunshine of Shadows," and "The Unheard" alternates with more original poems, native in theme and to a degree native in spirit, like "The Mower in Ohio," "The Pioneer's Chimney," "Fires in Illinois," and "Riding to Vote." There is no dialect, no straining for realistic effect, no sentimentality. In all that makes for art the poems have little for criticism: they are classical and finished and beautiful. But they lack life. There is nothing about them that grips the reader's heart, nothing that fixes itself in the memory, no single line that has distinction of phrase. Even in the Western poems like "The Mower in Ohio" there is no sharpness, no atmosphere, no feeling of reality. It is art rather than life; it is a conscious effort to make a poem. The case is typical. With the criticism one may sweep away once for all great areas of the poetry of the time. Far stronger are the vigorous lyrics of Maurice Thompson, whose work is to be found in so many literary fields of the period. His poetry, small in quantity, has a spirit of its own that is distinctive. It is tonic with the out-of-doors and it is masculine. One stanza from the poem "At Lincoln's Grave," delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard in 1893, voices the new Western soul: His humor, born of virile opulence, Stung like a pungent sap or wild-fruit zest, And satisfied a universal sense Of manliness, the strongest and the best; A soft Kentucky strain was in his voice, And the Ohio's deeper boom was there, With some wild accents of old Wabash days, And winds of Illinois; And when he spoke he took us unaware, With his high courage and unselfish ways. II