There are degrees of naturalness in nature, however. How far from the hubbub of commercialism should the poet reside? Burns and Wordsworth were content with the farm country, but for poets whose theories were not so intimately joined with experience such an environment was too tame. Bowles would send his visionary boy into the wilderness. [Footnote: See _The Visionary Boy_.] Coleridge and Southey went so far as to lay plans for emigrating, in person, to the banks of the Susquehanna. Shelley felt that savage conditions best foster poetry. [Footnote: See the _Defense of Poetry_: "In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet."] Campbell, in _Gertrude of Wyoming_, made his bard an Indian, and commented on his songs, So finished he the rhyme, howe'er uncouth, That true to Nature's fervid feelings ran (And song is but the eloquence of truth). The early American poet, J. G. Percival, expressed the same theory, declaring of poetry, Its seat is deeper in the savage breast Than in the man of cities. [Footnote: _Poetry_.] To most of us, this conception of the poet is familiar because of acquaintance, from childhood, with Chibiabus, "he the sweetest of all singers," in Longfellow's _Hiawatha_. But the poet of to-day may well pause, before he starts to an Indian reservation. What is the mysterious benefit which the poet derives from nature? Humility and common sense, Burns would probably answer, and that response would not appeal to the majority of poets. A mystical experience of religion, Wordsworth would say, of course. A wealth of imagery, nineteenth century poets would hardly think it worth while to add, for the influence of natural scenery upon poetic metaphors has come to be such a matter of course that one hardly realizes its significance. Perhaps, too, poets should admit oftener than they do the influence of nature's rhythms upon their style. As Madison Cawein says If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach My heart their beautiful parts of speech, And the natural art they say these with, My soul would sing of beauty and myth In a rhyme and a meter none before Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore. [Footnote: _Preludes_.] The influence of nature which the romantic poet stressed most, however, was a negative one. In a sense in which Wordsworth probably did not intend it, the romantic poet betrayed himself hastening to nature More like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved.