As became a churchman, he began to hold forth to his companion on the train to and from the city on the fascinations of the Anglican poets. Either his enthusiasm for the subject resulted in a series of articles on the theme, or an assignment for such a series of articles resulted in his enthusiasm, I don’t know which. The significant point is that it was just as like to have been either way about. “Passon Hawker”--Robert Stephen Hawker--Vicar of Morwenstow, a coast life-guard in a cassock--who can recite off hand the deeds of his piety and his valour? Well, on the Erie smoker he became one of the most romantic figures of story. Robert Herrick, in a manner of speaking, went home many a night on the Twelve-Forty-Five (Robert Herrick, that is, with his “Unbaptized Rhimes” left out), and Bishop Coxe returned on the Seven-Fifty-Six in the morning. Kilmer had already done a few book reviews for _The Nation_ and for the _New York Times_; but at _The Churchman_ he acquired such a proficiency at this exercise that he was able, jocularly, to regard Arnold Bennett, as a literary journalist, as a “mere amateur.” The real reward of “religious journalism,” however, it soon developed, was the opportunity of writing a feature which the secular might call an editorial, but the proper name of which this editor pronounced, in the tone and with the manner of one who was consciously engaged in something grand, gloomy and peculiar, as a “meditation.” The real meditations of Joyce Kilmer, however, were not “meditations” so called, and partook in no wise of the nature of editorials. He had been, in the main, a graceful troubadour who thrummed pleasant things to his lady-love, and had a bright eye to his singing robes. He had thought it rather fine, too, that refrain in imitation of Richepin: May booze be plenty, bulls be few, The poet is the beggars’ king. He had even been much taken, artistically, with the thought of absinthe: O little green god in your crystal shrine, Your heavenly dream-shower shed! It was when his business took him near to God, when his exploring spirit, upon a peak in Darien, beheld that: Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree, that he began to be a poet. “Trees,” which more than all the rest he had written put together made his reputation, appeared in _Poetry. A Magazine of Verse_ in August, 1913. At about this period it was that he was altogether born again. Then, doubtless in castigatory reaction against his own aesthetic and “decadent” wild oats, entered into his fibre that sovereign disdain for the intellectual flub-dub which later gave such a delightful note of “horse-sense” to all his humorous thought--the Johnsonian sting (“and don’t you think you were an ass?”) which found its earliest biting expression in the verses “To a Young Poet Who Killed Himself.”