Yet there be full many people
  Who with evil voice assail me,
  And with tongue of poison sting me,
  Saying that my lips are skilless,
  That the ways of song I know not,
  Nor the ballad’s pleasant turnings. 
  Ah, you should not, kindly people,
  Therein seek a cause to blame me,
  That, a child, I sang too often,
  That, unfledged, I twittered only. 
  I have never had a teacher,
  Never heard the speech of great men,
  Never learned a word unhomely,
  Nor fine phrases of the stranger. 
  Others to the school were going,
  I alone at home must keep me,
  Could not leave my mother’s elbow,
  In the wide world had her only;
  In the house had I my schooling,
  From the rafters of the chamber. 
  From the spindle of my mother,
  From the axehelve of my father,
  In the early days of childhood;
  But for this it does not matter,
  I have shown the way to singers,
  Shown the way, and blazed the tree-bark,
  Snapped the twigs, and marked the footpath;
  Here shall be the way in future,
  Here the track at last be opened
  For the singers better-gifted,
  For the songs more rich than mine are,
  Of the youth that now are waxing,
  In the good time that is coming!

Like Virgil’s husbandman, our minstrel did not know how well off he was to have been without schooling.  This, I think, every one feels at once to be poetry that sings itself.  It makes its own tune, and the heart beats in time to its measure.  By and by poets will begin to say, like Goethe, “I sing as the bird sings”; but this poet sings in that fashion without thinking of it or knowing it.  And it is the very music of his race and country which speaks through him with such simple pathos.  Finland is the mother and Russia is the stepdame, and the listeners to the old national lays grow fewer every day.  Before long the Fins will be writing songs in the manner of Heine, and dramas in imitation of “Faust.”  Doubtless the material of original poetry lies in all of us, but in proportion as the mind is conventionalized by literature, it is apt to look about it for models, instead of looking inward for that native force which makes models, but does not follow them.  This rose of originality which we long for, this bloom of imagination whose perfume enchants us—­we can seldom find it when it is near us, when it is part of our daily lives.

REVIEWS OF CONTEMPORARIES

HENRY JAMES

JAMES’S TALES AND SKETCHES[1]

[Footnote 1:  A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales.  By Henry James, Jr.  Boston:  J.R.  Osgood & Co. Transatlantic Sketches.  By the same author.]