_A Boy’s Will_, unlike the later volumes, is frankly subjective; original in outlook and idiom in spite of certain reminiscences of Browning. Chiefly lyrical, this volume, lacking the concentrated emotion of his subsequent works, is a significant introduction to the following book, which has become a contemporary classic. Early in 1914, Frost leased a small place in Gloucestershire, his neighbors being the poets Lascelles Abercrombie and W. W. Gibson. In the spring of the same year, _North of Boston_ (1914), one of the most intensely American books ever printed, was published in England. (See Preface.) This is, as he has called it, a “book of people.” And it is more than that—it is a book of backgrounds as living and dramatic as the people they overshadow. Frost vivifies a stone wall, an empty cottage, an apple-tree, a mountain, a forgotten wood-pile left To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow, smokeless burning of decay. _North of Boston_, like its successor, contains much of the finest poetry of our time. Rich in its actualities, richer in its spiritual values, every line moves with the double force of observation and implication. The first poem in the book illustrates this power of character and symbolism. Although Frost is not arguing for anything in particular, one senses here something more than the subterranean enemies of walls. In “Mending Wall,” we see two elemental and opposed forces. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” insists the seeker after causes; “Good fences make good neighbors,” doggedly maintains the literal-minded lover of traditions. Here, beneath the whimsical turns and pungency of expression, we have the essence of nationalism versus the internationalist; the struggle between a blind responsibility and a pagan iconoclasm. So with all of Frost’s characters. Like the worn out incompetent in “The Death of the Hired Man” (one of the finest _genre_ pictures of our time), the country boy in “Birches,” or the positive, tight-lipped old lady in “The Black Cottage,” his people are always intensified through the poet’s circumlocutory but precise psychology. They remain close to their soil. Frost’s monologs and dramatic idyls, written in a conversational blank verse, establish the connection between the vernacular and the language of literature; they remain rooted in realism. But Frost is never a photographic realist. “There are,” he once said, “two types of realist—the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one; and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I’m inclined to be the second kind.... To me, the thing that art does for life is to strip it to form.”