"The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside; I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the wood-pile; Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak, And went where he sat on a log, and led him in, and assured him, And brought water and fill'd a tub for his sweated body and bruis'd feet, And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes; And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles: He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated and pass'd North; (I had him sit next me at table--my firelock lean'd in the corner.)" But of the book as a whole I could form no adequate conception, and it was not for many years, and after I had known the poet himself, as already stated, that I saw in it a teeming, rushing globe well worthy my best days and strength to surround and comprehend. One thing that early took me in the poems was (as before alluded to) the tremendous personal force back of them, and felt through them as the sun through vapor; not merely intellectual grasp or push, but a warm, breathing, towering, magnetic Presence that there was no escape from. Another fact I was quick to perceive, namely, that this man had almost in excess a quality in which every current poet was lacking,--I mean the faculty of being in entire sympathy with actual nature, and the objects; and shows of nature, and of rude, abysmal man; and appalling directness of utterance therefrom, at first hand, without any intermediate agency or modification.