After a couple of hours I get tired, and go off for a ramble. I write
these concluding lines on a rock, under the shade of a tree on the
banks of the island. It is solitary here, the birds singing, the
sluggish muddy-yellow waters pouring down from the late rains of the
upper Potomac; the green heights on the south side of the river before
me. The single cannon from a neighboring fort has just been fired, to
signal high noon. I have walk'd all around Analostan, enjoying its
luxuriant wildness, and stopt in this solitary spot. A water snake
wriggles down the bank, disturb'd, into the water. The bank near by is
fringed with a dense growth of shrubbery, vines, &c.
FIVE THOUSAND POEMS
There have been collected in a cluster nearly five thousand big and
little American poems--all that diligent and long-continued research
could lay hands on! The author of 'Old Grimes is Dead' commenced
it, more than fifty years ago; then the cluster was pass'd on and
accumulated by C. F. Harris; then further pass'd on and added to by
the late Senator Anthony, from whom the whole collection has been
bequeath'd to Brown University. A catalogue (such as it is) has been
made and publish'd of these five thousand poems--and is probably the
most curious and suggestive part of the whole affair. At any rate it
has led me to some abstract reflection like the following.
I should like, for myself, to put on record my devout acknowledgment
not only of the great masterpieces of the past, but of the benefit of
_all_ poets, past and present, and of _all_ poetic utterance--in its
entirety the dominant moral factor of humanity's progress.
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