and the kindred poems among the last pages of the collected works of Tennyson.
Matthew Arnold had never touched him, but the music of Keats he understood naturally at sight. Of his own American poets he did not care for Whitman, whom he is so often told he resembles, but he loved Longfellow and all such word-music as—
Sandalphon the angel of glory,
Sandalphon the angel of prayer,
all of which he said one day as we were climbing among the rocks.
He began loving poetry by learning it by heart and reciting it for his own joy, and I began by writing in an exercise-book all the soldiers’ poems of Thomas Campbell and reading them—“a thousand times o’er”—
My little one kissed me a thousand times o’er,
And my wife sobbed aloud in her fullness of heart.
“Stay, stay with us! rest! thou art weary and worn,”
And fain was their war-broken soldier to stay;