On the one hand, I believe that a person with the
poetical faculty finds material everywhere. The grandest objects of
sense and thought are common to all climates and civilizations. The sky,
the woods, the waters, the storms, life, death love, the hope and vision
of eternity,--these are images that write themselves in poetry in every
soul which has anything of the divine gift.
On the other hand, there is such a thing as a lean, impoverished life, in
distinction from a rich and suggestive one. Which our common New England
life might be considered, I will not decide. But there are some things I
think the poet misses in our western Eden. I trust it is not unpatriotic
to mention them in this point of view as they come before us in so many
other aspects.
There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which we
grow. At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked up an
Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow. At Canoe Meadow, in the Berkshire
Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads. So everywhere Indian
arrowheads.
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