Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/225

Rh both true and imaginative, and therefore excellent realism. For Nature does not differentiate Truth to visible nature. her beauties; she combines them. It is hard to better the truth "by her own sweet and cunning hand put on." Bryant's successors—Whittier, Lowell, Whitman, Lanier, Taylor—have great fidelity to nature. Excellence of the American school. How can they help it, brought up in her own realm? Their touches are spontaneous, and that is everything. A city-bred poet is apt to strike false notes as soon as he hints at an intimacy with nature, and a false note is as quickly detected in poetry as in music, even by those who cannot sound the true one. As for truth to life—that depends on the poet's sympathetic perception. It was native to Burns; it was impossible with the self-absorbed Byron. Most poets, whether cockney or rustic, can draw only the types under their direct observation. Whitman's out-of-door poetry should be Whitman and Lanier. familiar to you. His admirers, including very authoritative judges at home and abroad, make almost every claim for him except that to which, in my opinion, he is entitled above other American poets. I know no other who surpasses him as a word-painter of nature. His eye is keen, his touch is accurate. No one depicts the American sky, ocean, forest, prairie, more characteristically or with a freer sense of atmosphere; no one is so inclusive of every object, living or inanimate, in the zones covered by our native land. His defects lie in his