These lyrics, I imagine, have been wrought in solitary wanderings, in which the forms and shows of things and human hopes and fears have been brooded upon until the intensity of contemplation has allied them with that soul of Nature in which the poet finds the fulfilment of all dreams and ideals. And in this refining back to an Over-Soul there is no suggestion of the student of academic philosophy, no over-wrought intellectualism. Such references arise naturally out of his thought and illuminate it. One can imagine how such lyrics were engendered: "I stood and twirled a feathered stalk, Or drank the clover's honey sap, Happiest without talk. "The summer tidal waves of night Slowly in silence rippled in: They steeped the feet of blazing light, And hushed day's harsher din." This aloofness from conflict, it if has hindered him from fully accepting and justifying life, the highest wisdom of the poet, has still its compensations. He has felt the manifold meaning of the voices through whose unconsciousness Nature speaks, the songs of birds, the aerial romance and intermingling of light and shadow, and has vision of the true proportion of things in that conflict he has turned his back on: "All things sip, And sip at life; but Time for ever drains The ever-filing cup in rivalship, And wipes the generations from his lip, While Art looks down from his serene domains." --June 15, 1895 --"YES, AND HOPE." They bring none to his or to her terminus or to be content and full, Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings. To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again. --Whitman