Of other modern poets I have read some things of William Morris, like the “Life and Death of Jason,” the “Story of Gudrun,” and the “Trial of Guinevere,” with a pleasure little less than passionate, and I have equally liked certain pieces of Dante Rossetti.  I have had a high joy in some of the great minor poems of Emerson, where the goddess moves over Concord meadows with a gait that is Greek, and her sandalled tread expresses a high scorn of the india-rubber boots that the American muse so often gets about in.

The “Commemoration Ode” of Lowell has also been a source from which I drank something of the divine ecstasy of the poet’s own exalted mood, and I would set this level with the ‘Biglow Papers,’ high above all his other work, and chief of the things this age of our country shall be remembered by.  Holmes I always loved, and not for his wit alone, which is so obvious to liking, but for those rarer and richer strains of his in which he shows himself the lover of nature and the brother of men.  The deep spiritual insight, the celestial music, and the brooding tenderness of Whittier have always taken me more than his fierier appeals and his civic virtues, though I do not underrate the value of these in his verse.

My acquaintance with these modern poets, and many I do not name because they are so many, has been continuous with their work, and my pleasure in it not inconstant if not equal.  I have spoken before of Longfellow as one of my first passions, and I have never ceased to delight in him; but some of the very newest and youngest of our poets have given me thrills of happiness, for which life has become lastingly sweeter.

Long after I had thought never to read it—­in fact when I was ’nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’—­I read Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and found in it a majestic beauty that justified to me the fame it wears, and eclipsed the worth of those lesser poems which I had ignorantly accounted his worthiest.  In fact, it was one of the literary passions of the time I speak of, and it shared my devotion for the novels of Tourguenief and (shall I own it?) the romances of Cherbuliez.  After all, it is best to be honest, and if it is not best, it is at least easiest; it involves the fewest embarrassing consequences; and if I confess the spell that the Revenge of Joseph Noirel cast upon me for a time, perhaps I shall be able to whisper the reader behind my hand that I have never yet read the “AEneid” of Virgil; the “Georgics,” yes; but the “AEneid,” no.  Some time, however, I expect to read it and to like it immensely.  That is often the case with things that I have held aloof from indefinitely.