Exceptional maturity of understanding of life, of nature, and all the little mysteries that are the shape of human moments, was conspicuously evidenced for as long as his intimates remember. The extraordinary measure of calm contained in his last pictures and in so many of the drawings done in moments of rest in camp is evidence of all this. He had a boy's brightness and certainty of the fairness of things, joined with a man's mastery of the simple problem. He was a true executive in material affairs and his vision was another part of the business of existence. As I have said, Rex Slinkard had the priceless poise of the true lyric poet, and it was the ordered system in his vision that proved him. He knew the value of his attitudes and he was certain that perfection is imperishable, and strove with a poet's calm intensity toward that. He had found his Egypt, his Assyria, his Greece, and his own specific Nirvana at his feet everywhere. As he stood attending to the duties of irrigation and the ripening of the alfalfa crops, he spent the moments otherwise lost in carving pebbles he found about him with rare gestures and profiles, either of his own face or body which he knew well, or the grace of other bodies and faces he had seen. He was always the young eye on things, an avid eye sure of the wonder about to escape from every living thing where light or shadow fell upon them gently. He was a sure, unquestionable, and in this sense a perfect poet, and possessed the undeniable painter's gift for presentation. He was of the company of Odilon Redon, of whom he had never heard, in his feeling for the almost occult presence emanating from everything he encountered everywhere, and his simple letters to his friends hold touches of the same beauty his drawings and paintings and carvings on pebbles contain. A born mystic and visionary as to the state of his soul, a boy of light in quest of the real wisdom that is necessary for the lyrical embodiment, this was Rex Slinkard, the western ranchman and poet-painter. "I think of the inhabitants of the earth and of the world, my home." This might have been a marginal note from the Book of Thel, or it might have been a line from some new songs of innocence and experience. It might have been spoken from out of one of the oaks of William Blake. It must have been heard from among the live oaks of Saugus. It was the simple speech of a ranchman of California, a real boy-man who loved everything with a poet's love because everything that lived, lived for him. Such were the qualities of Rex Slinkard, who would like to have remained in the presence of his friends, the inhabitants of the earth, to have lived long in the world, his home.