selection, if he makes any, seems altogether an affair of his mood, not of logic. His power of choice is nevertheless stronger than Whitman’s. He has a more than Wordsworthian distaste for analytic science: But these young scholars, who invade our hills, Bold as the engineer who fells the wood, And travelling often in the cut he makes, Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names. None the less have science and scientific terms invaded his poetry; nor is it simply the larger and the elemental aspects of modern discovery that claim his regard. With his individualistic turn of mind, he can not choose but have an eye for the precise and specific: Ah! well I mind the calendar, Faithful through a thousand years, Of the painted race of flowers, Exact to days, exact to hours. * * * * * I know the trusty almanac Of the punctual coming-back, On their due days, of the birds. He understands his own interest in such matters; not being very objective, he cannot understand the impulse of the young botanist. Lacking the dramatic and historical impulse, he wrote no long poems. “May-Day” is his longest and most sustained, although he never quite succeeded in ordering its parts. It “was probably written in snatches in the woods on his afternoon walks, through many years.” The volume to which it gave its name (1867) marked a distinct advance in fluency over the collection of his poems that had appeared twenty years earlier. But even considering his own final selection (1876) or considering the now standard text of all his poetry (published in 1904), we can scarcely affirm that the longing he expressed in 1839 was ever fully satisfied: “I am naturally keenly susceptible to the pleasures of rhythm, and cannot believe but one day I shall attain to that splendid dialect, so ardent is my wish; and these wishes, I suppose, are ever only the buds of power; but up to this hour I have never had a true success in such attempts.” It is probable that in spite of his New England good sense, his inherent esteem for propriety, his insight into the subtler workings of nature, he did not have the initial impulse of a Bryant and a Longfellow toward what he most needed in his education. Nature works also through the scientist and the pedagogue. Emerson doubts it: Can rules or tutors educate The semigod whom we await? He must be musical, Tremulous, impressional, Alive to gentle influence Of landscape and of sky, And tender to the spirit-touch Of man’s or maiden’s eye; But, to his native centre fast, Shall into Future fuse the Past, And the world’s flowing fates in his own mould recast.