Pictures of the Plains, the Indian camp, the mine, the mountain, the herd, the trail, are to be found scattered everywhere in his work. One finds them in the most unlikely places--diamonds embedded often in whole acres of clay. In so unpromising a book as _As It Was in the Beginning_ with its grotesque introduction explaining in characteristic mixed metaphor that "When, like a sentinel on his watch tower, the President, with his divine audacity and San Juan valor, voiced the real heart of the Americans against 'race suicide,' I hastened to do my part, in my own way, ill or well, in holding up his hands on the firing line"--even in this book one finds sudden flashes of truest poetry. He is describing winter on the Yukon. About him are an eager band of gold-seekers ready to press north: The siege of Troy knew scarce such men; The cowards had not voyaged then, The weak had died upon the way. He describes with realism the horrors and the beauties of the Arctic night, then at last the rising of the sun after the long darkness: Then glad earth shook her raiment wide, As some proud woman satisfied, Tiptoed exultant, till her form, A queen above some battle storm, Blazed with the glory, the delight Of battle with the hosts of night. And night was broken, light at last Lay on the Yukon. Night had past. In passages like these the imagination of the poet breaks out for a moment like the moon from dark clouds, but all too often it is _only_ for a moment. He is the poet preëminently of the mountains of the Northwest. The spell of them was on him as it was on John Muir. At times in their presence he bursts into the very ecstasy of poetry; sonorous rhapsodies and invocations in which he reaches his greatest heights: Sierras, and eternal tents Of snow that flash o'er battlements Of mountains! My land of the sun, Am I not true? have I not done All things for thine, for thee alone, O sun-land, sea-land thou mine own? There is a sweep and vastness about him at his best that one finds in no other American poet. No cameo cutting for him, no little panels, no parlor decorations and friezes. His canvas is all out of doors and as broad as the continent itself: Oh, heart of the world's heart! West! my West! Look up! look out! There are fields of kine, There are clover-fields that are red as wine; And a world of kine in the fields take rest, And ruminate in the shade of the trees That are white with blossoms or brown with bees. There are emerald seas of corn and cane; There are cotton fields like a foamy main, To the far-off South where the sun was born. The wild freedom of the Western air beats and surges in his lines: