And now just here I feel the impulse to interpolate something about the mighty four who stamp this first American century with its birthmarks of poetic literature. In a late magazine one of my reviewers, who ought to know better, speaks of my "attitude of contempt and scorn and intolerance" toward the leading poets--of my "deriding" them, and preaching their "uselessness." If anybody cares to know what I think--and have long thought and avow'd--about them, I am entirely willing to propound. I can't imagine any better luck befalling these States for a poetical beginning and initiation than has come from Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant, and Whittier. Emerson, to me, stands unmistakably at the head, but for the others I am at a loss where to give any precedence. Each illustrious, each rounded, each distinctive. Emerson for his sweet, vital-tasting melody, rhym'd philosophy, and poems as amber-clear as the honey of the wild bee he loves to sing. Longfellow for rich color, graceful forms and incidents--all that makes life beautiful and love refined--competing with the singers of Europe on their own ground, and, with one exception, better and finer work than that of any of them. Bryant pulsing the first interior verse-throbs of a mighty world--bard of the river and the wood, ever conveying a taste of open air, with scents as from hayfields, grapes, birch-borders--always lurkingly fond of threnodies--beginning and ending his long career with chants of death, with here and there through all, poems, or passages of poems, touching the highest universal truths, enthusiasms, duties--morals as grim and eternal, if not as stormy and fateful, as anything in Eschylus. While in Whittier, with his special themes--(his outcropping love of heroism and war, for all his Quakerdom, his verses at times like the measur'd step of Cromwell's old veterans)--in Whittier lives the zeal, the moral energy, that founded New England--the splendid rectitude and ardor of Luther, Milton, George Fox--I must not, dare not, say the wilfulness and narrowness--though doubtless the world needs now, and always will need, almost above all, just such narrowness and wilfulness. MILLET'S PICTURES LAST ITEMS