"
He delights us
"... with meadows, rippling tides and trees and flowers and grass,
And the low hum of living breeze--and in the midst God's beautiful
eternal right hand."
No American poet was more fond of the ocean. Its aspect and music, more
than any other object of nature, influenced his verse. He addresses the sea
in lines like these:--
"With husky-haughty lips, O sea!
Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore,
Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions,
(I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,)
Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal,
Thy ample, smiling face, dash'd with the sparkling dimples of the sun."
He especially loves motion in nature. His poetry abounds in the so-called
motor images. [Footnote: For a discussion of the various types of images of
the different poets, see the author's _Education of the Central Nervous
System_, Chaps. VII., VIII., IX., X.] He takes pleasure in picturing a
scene
"Where the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks,"
or in watching
"The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing."
While his verse is fortunately not without idealistic touches, his poetic
theory is uncompromisingly realistic, as may be seen in his critical prose
essays, some of which deserve to rank only a little below those of Lowell
and Poe.
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