It is in this ode, with the exception of his visioning of “Night” in _Last Songs from Vagabondia_, that the influence of Whitman upon Hovey comes out most prominently; that is, the influence of manner. The really vital influence is one much less easily demonstrated, but no less apparent to a student of both poets. It is not of the sort, however, to detract from the originality of Hovey, but rather an intensifying of his characteristics, a focalizing of his powers, and is in accordance with Whitman’s declaration that “He most honors my style Who learns under it to destroy the teacher.” Hovey’s own nature was so individual that he rarely failed to destroy the teacher, or he was perhaps unconscious of having one; but in the opening lines of the ode in question the Whitman note is unmistakable: I said in my heart, “I am sick of four walls and a ceiling. I have need of the sky. I have business with the grass. I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling, Lone and high, And the slow clouds go by. * * * * * Spring, like a huntsman’s boy, Halloos along the hillsides and unhoods The falcon in my will. The dogwood calls me, and the sudden thrill That breaks in apple blooms down country roads Plucks me by the sleeve and nudges me away. The sap is in the boles to-day, And in my veins a pulse that yearns and goads.” Could volumes of conventional nature poetry set one a-tingle like this? The crowning excellence of Hovey’s nature poems is that they are never reports, they do not describe with far-sought imagery, but are as personal as a poem of love or other emotion. Such passionate surrender, such intimate delight as finds expression, for example, in “The Faun,” could scarcely be more communicative and direct. It becomes at once our own mood, an interchange which is the test of art: … And I plunge in the wood, and the swift soul cleaves Through the swirl and the flow of the leaves, As a swimmer stands with his white limbs bare to the sun For the space that a breath is held, and drops in the sea; And the undulant woodland folds round me, intimate, fluctuant, free, Like the clasp and the cling of waters, and the reach and the effort is done;— There is only the glory of living, exultant to be. In such words as these one loses thought of the merely picturesque, their infection takes hold upon him, particularly in that line befitting the forest spirit as a garment, in which The undulant woodland folds round me, intimate, fluctuant, free,— a line wherein the idea, feeling, movement, and diction are wholly at one. It is impossible for Richard Hovey to be aloof and analytical in any phase of his work, and when he writes of nature it is as the comrade to whom she is a mystic personality. A stanza of “The Faun” illustrates this; still in the wood, he asks: