To me the thought of Moody is satisfying not only because he typifies those qualities which I like to think we ought to find in American literature, but because he exemplifies my ideal of a poet. There have been many insane geniuses; men whose glory has shone sometimes fitfully through bodily or mental infirmity. Some of us are accustomed to the idea that genius is in fact insanity or is akin to it. Certainly the words “wholesome” and “healthy” have been applied so many times to mediocre productions that we are wary of them. But is not the insanity of genius after all merely the abnormal greatness and preponderance of a single quality in a man? If by some miracle his other qualities could have been equally great, would he not have been a still nobler artist? To me the Greek impulse of proportionate development has an irresistible appeal. To be sane, not by the denial of a disproportionate inspiration, but by the lifting of all the faculties to its level: that is a dream worthy of the god in man. To be an artist not by the denial of competing faculties, but by the fullest development of all faculties under an inexorable will which unites them in a common purpose: that is a rich conception of personality. The perfect poet should be the perfect man. He should be not insane, but saner than the rest of us. Moody not only expressed this ideal in his life, but in his work. He was strong and sound, physically, mentally, spiritually. No one who has read his letters can miss the golden roundness of his humor, his humanity, his manliness. Yet never for a moment did he make a comfortable denial of the will to soar. In his poem _The Death of Eve_ he has burningly expressed the development of personality. Eve, an aged woman, has not succumbed to the view that she committed an unforgivable sin in disobeying God to taste the apple. Taking old Cain with her, she fearlessly enters the garden again to show herself to God before she dies. In her mystic song she sings: Behold, against thy will, against thy word, Against the wrath and warning of thy sword, Eve has been Eve, O Lord! A pitcher filled, she comes back from the brook, A wain she comes, laden with mellow ears; She is a roll inscribed, a prophet’s book Writ strong with characters. Behold, Eve willed it so; look, if it be so, look! And after singing of her life and of how she had been sensitive to the love of her husband and children, she goes on: Still, still with prayer and ecstasy she strove To be the woman they did well approve, That, narrowed to their love, She might have done with bitterness and blame; But still along the yonder edge of prayer A spirit in a fiery whirlwind came— Eve’s spirit, wild and fair— Crying with Eve’s own voice the number of her name.