Taine, anyhow, "is self-regulated from without; it carries its own counterpoise, and does not receive it from elsewhere-lives on its own blood”—a solace to my frequent bruises and sulky vanity. As the present is perhaps mainly an attempt at personal statement or illustration, I will allow myself as further be dominated by the poetry of the Old World, and remain unsupplied with autochthonous song, to express, vitalize, and give color to and define their material and political success, and minister to them distinctively, so long will they stop short of first-class nationality and remain defective. In the free evening of my day I give talk, thoughts, reminiscences, As idly drifting down the ebb, help to extract the following anecdote 10 to you, reader, the foregoing garrulous from a book, Annals of Old Painters, conn'd by me in youth. Rubens, the Flemish painter, in one of his wanderings, through the galleries of old convents, came across a singular work. After looking at it thoughtfully for a good while, and listening to the criticisms of his suite of students, he said to the latter, in answer to their questions (as to what school the work im- 20 plied or belong'd), "I do not believe the artist, unknown and perhaps no longer living, who has given the world this legacy, ever belong'd to any school, or ever painted anything but this one picture, which is a personal affair-a piece out of a man's life." Leaves of Grass indeed (I cannot too often reiterate) has mainly been the outcropping of my own emotional 30 and other personal nature-an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America), freely, fully and truly on record. I could not find any similar personal record in current literature that satisfied me. But it is not on Leaves of Grass distinctively as literature, or a specimen thereof, that I feel 40 to dwell, or advance claims. No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly towards art or æstheticism. I say no land or people or circumstances ever existed so needing a race of singers and poems differing from all others, and rigidly their own, as the land and people and cir- 50 cumstances of our United States need such singers and poems to-day, and for the future. Still further, as long as the States continue to absorb and Concluding with two items for the imaginative genius of the West, when it worthily rises-First, what Herder taught to the young Goethe, that really great poetry is always (like the Homeric or Biblical canticles) the result of a national spirit, and not the privilege of a polished and select few; Second, that the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung. COWBOY SONGS 1 THE COWBOY'S DREAM 2 3 5 Roll on, roll on; Roll on, little dogies, roll on. 10 The road to that bright, happy region Is posted and blazed all the way. They say there will be a great round up, And cowboys, like dogies, will stand, Copyright, The Macmillan Company. 2 Tune, "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean." 3 yearling steers |