I, too, love to see the forms worthily used, as they always are by the master; and I have no expectation that they are going out of fashion right away.  A great deal of poetry that serves, and helps sweeten one’s cup, would be impossible without them,—­would be nothing when separated from them.  It is for the ear, and for the sense of tune and of carefully carved and modeled forms, and is not meant to arouse the soul with the taste of power, and to start off on journeys for itself.  But the great inspired utterances, like the Bible,—­what would they gain by being cast in the moulds of metrical verse?  In all that concerns art, viewed from any high standpoint,—­proportion, continence, self-control, unfaltering adherence to natural standards, subordination of parts, perfect adjustment of the means to the end, obedience to inward law, no trifling, no levity, no straining after effect, impartially attending to the back and loins as well as to the head, and even holding toward his subject an attitude of perfect acceptance and equality,—­principles of art to which alone the great spirits are amenable,—­in all these respects, I say, this poet is as true as an orb in astronomy.

To his literary expression pitched on scales of such unprecedented breadth and loftiness, the contrast of his personal life comes in with a foil of curious homeliness and simplicity.  Perhaps never before has the absolute and average commonness of humanity been so steadily and unaffectedly adhered to.  I give here a glimpse of him in Washington on a Navy Yard horse-car, toward the close of the war, one summer day at sundown.  The car is crowded and suffocatingly hot, with many passengers on the rear platform, and among them a bearded, florid-faced man, elderly but agile, resting against the dash, by the side of the young conductor, and evidently his intimate friend.  The man wears a broad-brim white hat.  Among the jam inside, near the door, a young Englishwoman, of the working class, with two children, has had trouble all the way with the youngest, a strong, fat, fretful, bright babe of fourteen or fifteen months, who bids fair to worry the mother completely out, besides becoming a howling nuisance to everybody.  As the car tugs around Capitol Hill the young one is more demoniac than ever, and the flushed and perspiring mother is just ready to burst into tears with weariness and vexation.  The car stops at the top of the hill to let off most of the rear platform passengers, and the white-hatted man reaches inside, and, gently but firmly disengaging the babe from its stifling place in the mother’s arms, takes it in his own, and out in the air.  The astonished and excited child, partly in fear, partly in satisfaction at the change, stops its screaming, and, as the man adjusts it more securely to his breast, plants its chubby hands against him, and, pushing off as far as it can, gives a good long look squarely in his face,—­then, as if satisfied, snuggles down with its head on his