FOREWORD



   It is with a sense of sadness and regret that this book,
written by one who universally has endeared himself to
lovers of nature through his revelation of her mysteries,
must be prefaced as containing the last songs of this ex-
quisite singer of the South.
   Whren the final word is spoken it is fitting that it be by
one of authority. William Dean Howells, in the pages of
The North American Review, offers this tribute:
   "I had read his poetry and loved it from the beginning,
and in each successive expression of it, I had delighted in
its expanding and maturing beauty. Between the earliest
and the latest thing there may have been a hundred differ-
ent things in the swan-like life of a singer . . . but we take
the latest as if it summed him up in motive and range and
tendency. . . . Not one of his lovely landscapes but
thrilled with a human presence penetrating to it from his
most sensitive and subtle spirit until it was all but painfully
alive with memories, with regrets, with longings, with hopes,
with all that from time to time mutably constitutes us men
and women, and yet keeps us children. He has the gift, in
a measure, that I do not think surpassed in any poet, of
touching some commonest thing in nature, and making it
live, from the manifold associations in which we have our
being, and glow thereafter with an indistinguishable
beauty. . . . No other poet can outword this poet when it
comes to choosing some epithet fresh from the earth and
air, and with the morning sun and light upon it, for an emo-
tion or an experience in which the race renews its youth
from generation to generation. . . . His touch leaves every-
thing that was dull to the sense before glowing in the light
of joyful recognition."
  With a tone of conviction Edwin Markham says:
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