All this is sheer gossip, motivated partly by an ugly desire to hurt Lincoln’s fame and partly by a vulgar attempt to account for his genius by giving him a father more promising than Thomas Lincoln. At the worst it is disgusting; at the best it is stupidly unimaginative, for the Hardin, Henry, Marshall, Calhoun stories are singularly frail, and the Enlows and Inlows and Enloes of the legend were certainly no more likely to beget a genius than the actual father. Even the Baconians have chosen a great man to explain Shakespeare with. The only use of the whole matter is to throw some light upon the way in which in unenlightened ages, when there was no Mr. Barton to investigate the facts and lay the ghosts, various nations of mankind have sought to explain their heroes and leaders of humble birth by finding for them, among gods or demigods, fathers more suitable than the plain men who, such is the mystery of genius, are all that need be taken into account. THE MUSE OF KNICKERBOCKER We guiterman a volume when, Though but one pen can rightly do it, We view it reasonably, then With ripe and rippling rhymes review it. (How delicate should be the eye, How deft and definite the hand Of the audacious poet by Whom Guiterman is guitermanned!) This Arthur with the nib of gold, The quaintest of the critic carpers Who sang New York, has sung the Old Manhattan now in ballads (Harpers). The color of his music moves From Dobson’s to our Yankee Doodle’s; Assay his mixture, and it proves, However, Guiterman in oodles. He sings the founders: “Kips, Van Dorns, Van Dams, Van Wycks, Van Dycks, Van Pelts, Van Tienhovens, Schermerhorns, And Onderdoncks and Roosevelts.” Of Tappan Zee, of Nepperhan, Of Hellegatt, of Spuyten Duyvil, Of’t Maagde Paetje, Guiterman Here rhymes in rings around each rival. Adieu vers libre, adieu the news, Adieu the horrid shilling-shocker; We hail the marriage of the Muse To Mynheer Diedrich Knickerbocker. IX. POETS’ CORNER GREEK DIGNITY AND YANKEE EASE The single solid volume of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s _Collected Poems_ holds without crowding all but a few lines of the verse into which one of the acutest of Americans has distilled his observations and judgments during thirty studious, pondering, devoted, elevated years. Never once does Mr. Robinson show any signs of having withdrawn his attention from the life passing immediately under his eyes; but he has no more frittered away his powers in a trivial contemporaneousness than he has buried them under a recluse abstention from actualities: he has, rather, with his gaze always upon the facts before him, habitually seen through and behind them to the truths which give them significance and coherence. That he from the first chose deliberately to follow an individual—however solitary—path appears from a very early sonnet, _Dear Friends_: