up. His clean strokes gave him a sense of happy mastery.
Diving, however, was another matter. Again and again he made the trial, but always landed flat. The unfeeling surface of Lord Byron’s pool would all but slap the breath out of his defenseless body, but he ever came up gallantly to a new plunge until his muscles had learned their trick. What joy when he won his first happy high dive—“into cleanness leaping” with keen lithe grace. That morning, sky and water were one tender, rose-tinged, rippling coolness of silver gray, and the breakfast spread in the dewy garden was a feast for gods and heroes. The eggs were golden fare indeed, and the honey tasted of hawthorn and apple blossoms.
With a like persistency, he practised diving of another sort. Again and again he essayed the plunge far below the surface of every-day thoughts and fancies in the hope of bringing up the perfect pearl of his dreams—a poem in which the white light of truth should be all fair-rounded, pure-gleaming beauty. “I can feel the one thing that is worth while, and it seems as if I had it in my hand,” he mourned, “but when I look there is only a wisp of seaweed, and a shell or two with echoes in their pearly coils of the eternal whisper of the waves!”
“Your life is too much an unbroken round of happy happenings,” hinted one of his friends. “If you could run away into the wilds for a time—away from your many admiring friends and the chatter of afternoon teas and tennis courts—you might find yourself more in touch with the big things you long for.”
“I think I’ll try a trip to America,” resolved the young poet. “There may be some sort of a new world still to be discovered in the States or Canada—or beyond among the islands of the South Seas.”
In his “Letters from America,” which appeared first in the “Westminster Gazette” and were afterward published with a biographical introduction by Henry James, we have some of his off-hand impressions of the New World. We get glimpses of New York Harbor at night and in the early morning, as a poet sees it. We see the crowds and electric glare of Broadway with something of the detached amusement that a careless and idly curious traveler from another planet might feel. And we see a Harvard-Yale baseball game and the 1913 Commencement at Cambridge with the eyes of that elder Cambridge across the Atlantic. This is the way the one-time cricketer and football champion viewed his first “ball game.”