[21] Robert Browning (1812-1889). One of the greatest of English poets. My Last Duchess is one of his many powerful dramatic monologues.
WHO OWNS THE MOUNTAINS?[22]
By HENRY VAN DYKE
(1852—). One of the most popular American essayists. After many years of service as a Presbyterian minister he became Professor of English Literature in Princeton University. During the early part of the World War he was U. S. Minister to the Netherlands and Luxembourg, where his services were notably patriotic. His poems, essays and short stories have won wide and well-deserved popularity. Among them are The Poetry of Tennyson; The Other Wise Man; The First Christmas Tree; Fisherman's Luck; The Blue Flower; Out of Doors in the Holy Land; The Unknown Quantity; Collected Poems. Dr. Van Dyke was at one time President of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Something of the spirit of sunset and of the quietness of the woods and mountains has crept into Dr. Van Dyke's essay. We sit with him and look off at the ridges and hollows of forest. We find our own thoughts about the beauty of earth expressed as we can not express them. We are lifted in meditation as Dr. Van Dyke was lifted when he looked off at the great hills.
Power to reveal inner meanings in the world of outdoors and of man, and to ennoble the soul, is one of the reasons why the essay has such a high place in the affections of those who love literature.
Who Owns the Mountains? shows both the felicity of Dr. Van Dyke's style and the nobility of his thought.
It was the little lad that asked the question; and the answer also, as you will see, was mainly his.
We had been keeping Sunday afternoon together in our favorite fashion, following out that pleasant text which tells us to “behold the fowls of the air.” There is no injunction of Holy Writ less burdensome in acceptance, or more profitable in obedience, than this easy out-of-doors commandment. For several hours we walked in the way of this precept, through the untangled woods that lie behind the Forest Hills
Lodge,[23] where a pair of pigeon-hawks had their nest; and around the brambly shores of the small pond, where Maryland yellow-throats and song-sparrows were settled; and under the lofty hemlocks of the fragment of forest across the road, where rare warblers flitted silently among the tree-tops. The light beneath the evergreens was growing dim as we came out from their shadow into the widespread glow of the sunset, on the edge of a grassy hill, overlooking the long valley of the Gale River, and uplooking to the Franconia Mountains.