The origin of “The Twelve-Forty-Five” I do not exactly know. But I remember shortly before that poem was written, sitting disgusted and miserable with Kilmer in that horrible “Jersey City shed” waiting for the midnight train. Taking out of his mouth that villainously large, fifty-cent pipe (mentioned in all genuine appreciations) Kilmer, with a fervour almost violent, suddenly exclaimed: “I certainly do like railroad stations! They are fine places!” The very famous poem “The White Ships and The Red” (a poem so wonderfully effective that it was at once reprinted all over the country and in Europe) was a newspaper assignment. He rather liked the poem when he saw it in the paper; though, with his feet cocked up on his desk, he spoke apologetically of what he felt to be the failure of the latter stanzas to link up perfectly with the first, explaining that a luncheon appointment, at which he chatted for an hour or two, had split the writing of it into two sittings. That the author of this “Lusitania” poem thoroughly felt and meant what he said, is, I fancy, sufficiently proven by the event to permit of this being told. The point is, that Kilmer was a poet, an artist of a high order, a perfectly conscious master of what he was doing. The febrile gush of emotion he loathed. He knew finely that: It is stern work, it is perilous work, to thrust your hand in the sun And pull out a spark of immortal flame to warm the hearts of men. There was nothing accidental about the effect of his own verse, any more than there was “luck” in his worldly success. He achieved the one as he did the other by a masculine heart and mind. And while all things were necessary and joyous, it was impossible not to feel that, after all, throughout his day “the rhymer’s honest trade” was his primary concern. He was sufficiently grounded in literature to feel, as Mr. Le Gallienne says, no “weariness with those literary methods which had sufficed for Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, or Catullus or Bion, or François Villon--content, with reverent ambition, to tread that immortal path.”