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 ing terms of his freshness of theme and treatment, of his tropical color, his myth-making power, his fluent, rapid, and melodious verse, and "the supreme independence, the spontaneity, the all-pervading passion, the unresting energy, and the prodigal wealth of imagery which stamp the poetry before us."

They did not hesitate, this chorus of reviewers, to tell him that his poetry was the most important that had ever come out of America. Nor did they stop with this equivocal praise. The Athenæum found him like Browning in his humor and in the novelty of his metaphors. The Saturday Review dwelt on his Byronic qualities, and remarked in him "a ring of genuineness which is absent from Byron." The Westminster Review thought that he reminded one of Whitman, with the coarseness left out. And The Academy gravely declared that "there is an impassable gap between the alien couleur locale of even so great a poet as Victor Hugo in such a work as Les Orientales, and the native recipiency of one like our California author, whose very blood and bones are related to the things he describes, and from whom a perception and a knowledge so extremely unlike our own are no more separable than his eye, and his brain."

In the wake of the journalistic ovation, social invitations came in upon the poet faster than he could accept or answer them. Among those which he had pushed aside were three letters signed