A little girl of eleven was working here in the study through the long forenoon. In the midst of it, we each looked up and out through the barred window to the nearest elm, where a song-sparrow had just finished a perfect expression of the thing as he felt it. The song was more elaborate, perhaps, because the morning was lofty and glorious. Old Mother Nature smelled like a tea-rose that morning; one would know from that without the sense of direction that the wind was from the south. The song from the sunlight among the new elm leaves was so joyous that it choked us. It stood out from all the songs of the morning, because it was so near, and we had each been called by it from the pleasant mystery of our tasks. The little girl leaned toward the window. We heard the other bird answer from the distance, and then _ours_ sang again—and again. We sipped the ecstacy in the hushes. Like a flicker the little bird was gone—a leaning forward on the branch, and then a blur ... and presently the words in the room: “... sang four songs and flew away.” It was a word-portrait, and told me much that I wanted. The number, of course, was not mental, clearly a part of the inner impression. However, no explanation will help if the art of the saying is not apparent. I told the thing as it is here, to a class later in the day, and a woman said: “Why, those six words make a Japanese poem.” I wonder if it is oriental? Rather I think it belongs especially to our new generation, the elect of which seems to know innately that an expression of truth in itself is a master-stroke. Somehow the prison-house has not closed altogether upon the elect of the new generation. There are lines in the new poetry that could come forth, and have their being, only from the inner giant that heretofore has been asleep except in the hearts of the rarest few whose mothers mated with Gods, merely using men for a symbol and the gift of matter.... As I believe that the literary generation which has the floor in America today is the weakest and the bleakest that ever made semi-darkness of good sunlight, so I believe that the elect of the new generation contains individuals who are true heaven-borns; that they bring their own light with them and do not stand about stretched for reflection; that they refuse to allow the world-lie to shut the passages of power within them, between the zone of dreams and the more temperate zones of matter. They have refused to accept us—that is the splendid truth.