The next poem, “Richard Cory,” illustrates a very ancient but very profound philosophy of life with a curiously local touch which points its keen insight. Those who feel poetry in their marrow and fibre are the spiritual heirs of the ages; and so it is natural that this man from Maine, many of whose poems could have been written only by one to whom the most real of lives is the life of the American small town, should write his “Ballade of Broken Flutes”—where “A lonely surge of ancient spray told of an unforgetful sea”;—should write the poem beginning “Since Persia fell at Marathon, The yellow years have gathered fast: Long centuries have come and gone”; and the very original sonnet on Amaryllis, the last three lines of which are: “But though the trumpets of the world were glad, It made me lonely and it made me sad To think that Amaryllis had grown old.” Some of his images stay fixed in one’s mind, as in “The Pity of the Leaves,” the lines running: “The brown, thin leaves that on the stones outside Skipped with a freezing whisper.” Sometimes he writes, as in “The Tavern,” of what most of us feel we have seen; and then again of what we have seen only with the soul’s eyes. I shall close by quoting entire his poem on “The Wilderness,” which could have been written only by a man into whose heart there had entered deep the very spirit of the vast and melancholy Northern forests: “Come away! come away! there’s a frost along the marshes, And a frozen wind that skims the shoal where it shakes the dead black water; There’s a moan across the lowland and a wailing through the woodland Of a dirge that sings to send us back to the arms of those that love us. There is nothing left but ashes now where the crimson chills of autumn Put off the summer’s languor with a touch that made us glad For the glory that is gone from us, with a flight we can not follow, To the slopes of other valleys and the sounds of other shores. “Come away! come away! you can hear them calling, calling, Calling to us to come to them, and roam no more. Over there beyond the ridges and the land that lies between us, There’s an old song calling us to come! “Come away! come away! for the scenes we leave behind us Are barren for the lights of home and a flame that’s young forever; And the lonely trees around us creak the warning of the night-wind, That love and all the dreams of love are away beyond the mountains. The songs that call for us to-night, they have called for men before us, And the winds that blow the message, they have blown ten thousand years; But this will end our wander-time, for we know the joy that waits us In the strangeness of home-coming, and a faithful woman’s eyes.