Markham’s work are such as hardly to justify his admeasurement by any standard lower than the highest that we have. My chief objection relates to the sentiment of the piece, the thought that the work carries; for although thought is no part of the poetry conveying it, and, indeed, is almost altogether absent from some of the most precious pieces (lyrical, of course) in our language, no elevated composition has the right to be called great if the message that it delivers is neither true nor just. All poets, even the little ones, are feelers, for poetry is emotional; but all the great poets are thinkers as well. Their sympathies are as broad as the race, but they do not echo the peasant’s philosophies of the workshop and the field. In Mr. Markham’s poem the thought is that of the labor union—even to the workworn threat of rising against the wicked well-to-do and taking it out of their hides. Who made him dead to rapture and despair, A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? One is somehow reminded by these lines of Coleridge’s questions in the Chamouni hymn, and one is tempted to answer them the same way: God. “The Man with the Hoe” is not a product of the “masters, lords and rulers in all lands”: they are not, and no class of men is, accountable for him, his limitations and his woes, which are not of those “that kings or laws can cause or cure.” The “masters, lords and rulers” are as helpless “in the fell clutch of circumstance” as he—which Mr. Markham would be speedily made to understand if appointed Dictator. The notion that the sorrows of the humble are due to the selfishness of the great is “natural,” and can be made poetical, but it is silly. As a literary conception it has not the vitality of a sick fish. It will not carry a poem of whatever excellence through two generations. That a man of Mr. Markham’s splendid endowments should be chained to the body of this literary death is no less than a public calamity.