Matthew Arnold had never touched him, but the music of Keats he understood naturally at sight. Of his own American poets he did not care for Whitman, whom he is so often told he resembles, but he loved Longfellow and all such word-music as-- Sandalphon the angel of glory, Sandalphon the angel of prayer, all of which he said one day as we were climbing among the rocks. He began loving poetry by learning it by heart and reciting it for his own joy, and I began by writing in an exercise-book all the soldiers’ poems of Thomas Campbell and reading them--“a thousand times o’er”-- My little one kissed me a thousand times o’er, And my wife sobbed aloud in her fullness of heart. “Stay, stay with us! rest! thou art weary and worn,” And fain was their war-broken soldier to stay; But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn, And the voice in my dreaming ear--melted away! How precious are the recollections of one’s first love of poetry! If as a boy you read the “Golden Legend” walking in country lanes when the hay was cut in swathes in the fields on either hand; if you have ever lain in the midst of a cornfield and crooned to yourself the exultant promises of Rabbi ben Ezra, or climbed mountains with “Marmion” in your heart, or lisped the “Ode to a Nightingale” to the first girl you loved, how touching it will always be in memory! The poet and the tramp shared thus their recollections as they wandered amidst heights and depths. They surely know much more of one another now! _I think the poet Learned to be a poet, By living with the poets Till he became a poet._ _He had the great need in him To give a song a tune. So he listened how the birds sang And he began to croon._ _Now he’s singing for a living And living for his singing. And his companion’s singing, And all of us are singing, Because he’s learned to sing._ [Illustration: THE CLOUDS CAME OUT OF THEIR HOMES TO SEE US] XXV. STOPPED BY THE CLOUDS WE scrambled through thickets to Mount Grinnell, which stands like a gigantic fortress, a bulwark of this world against others. Its impregnability seemed appalling. Fancy knocking at that door after it was shut! We stopped and looked up at it, and the sight of it relaxed our tense human energy and left us with very contrite souls. However, the nearer we got to it the less it was magnified. Its battlements receded and we soon had a fly’s view of the mountain, the view which the fly has when it is walking on the barren surface of the rock.