Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/31

 THE RANDALL FAMILY 23

Mr. Edwin P. Whipple, whose reputation at the time stood second to that of no New England writer in respect to delicacy of critical insight or soundness of literary judg- ment, wrote the following notice in some Boston journal of which neither name nor date is preserved in the printed slip here copied : —

"These poems are evidently the production of a mind of no common order, a mind which has earned the right to a direct communion with Nature by watching her every mood, and which fearlessly flings at artificial life the moni- tions and sarcasms which are learned in her austere school. Though evidently the work of a man accomplished both in literature and science, it derives little aid from either, if we except the habits of mind which are induced by study. The individuality of the writer is always prominent, lead- ing him to state nothing which he has not himself seen, thought, or experienced, and to toss scornfully aside the traditional commonplaces and common phrases of poetry. This independence, while it makes him instinctively avoid all pretence, sentimental hypocrisy, and imitation, is not without the wilfulness which independence of mind is so apt to produce. It occasionally leads him to the choice of topics not essentially poetical, to give an undue emphasis to his own moods, to fall into rugged modes of expression in his desire to avoid the stereotyped phraseology and har- monies of versification, and to impress on his woodland notes a character rather rustical than sylvan. But these faults are more than counterbalanced by his power of keen, vigilant and accurate observation, his quaint energy of statement, his sympathy with all those forms of manhood which have in them the tough vitality of New England nature, his frequent depth and delicacy of perception and

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