Oh, what is it breathes in the air? Oh, what is it touches my cheek? There’s a sense of a presence that lurks in the branches. But where? Is it far, is it far to seek? The first two collections of the _Vagabondia_ books contain Hovey’s most spontaneous nature verse; they have also some of the lyrics by which he will be known when such a rollicking stave as “Barney McGee,” at which one laughs as a boyish exuberance, is forgotten. The quips of rhyme and fancy that enliven the pages of the earlier volumes give place, in the _Last Songs_, to a note of seriousness and artistic purpose which sets the collection to an entirely different key; not that the work is uniformly superior to that of the former songs, but it is more earnest in tone; dawn is giving place to noon. From the second collection may be cited one of the lyric inspirations that sometimes came to Hovey, all warmth and color, as if fashioned complete in a thought. It is called “A Sea Gypsy,” and the first of its quatrains, though perhaps not more than the others, has a haunting charm: I am fevered with the sunset, I am fretful with the bay, For the wander-thirst is on me And my soul is in Cathay. There’s a schooner in the offing, With her topsails shot with fire, And my heart has gone aboard her For the Islands of Desire. I must forth again to-morrow! With the sunset I must be Hull down on the trail of rapture In the wonder of the sea. Aside from the dramas, and the noble elegy, “Seaward,” Hovey’s most representative work is found in his collection, _Along the Trail_, which opens with a group of battle-hymns inspired by the Spanish-American war. With the exception of “Unmanifest Destiny,” and occasional trumpet notes from the poem called “Bugles,” these battle-songs are more or less perfunctory, nor are they ethically the utterance of a prophet. There is the old assumption that because war has ever been, it ever will be; that because the sword has been the instrument of progress in past world-crises, it is the divinely chosen arbiter. There is nothing of that development of man that shall find a higher way, no visioning of a world-standard to which nations shall conform; it is rather the celebration of brawn, as in the sonnet “America.” The jubilant note of his call of the “Bugles,” however, thrills with passionate pride in his country as the deliverer of the weak, for the ultimate idea in Hovey’s mind was his country’s altruism; but, as a whole, the battle-songs lack the larger vision and are unequal in workmanship, falling constantly into the commonplace from some flight of lyric beauty. The best of them, and a worthy best, both in conception and in its dignified simplicity, is “Unmanifest Destiny,” which follows: To what new fates, my country, far And unforeseen of foe or friend, Beneath what unexpected star, Compelled to what unchosen end,