course, he never takes his friends’ advice; he has long known that they know nothing whatever about it.  He is probably quite ignorant of metrical law, but one precept instinct taught him from the beginning, and he finds it expressed one day in Wordsworth (with a blessed comfort of assurance—­like in this little, O, may be like, somehow, in the great thing too!):  ‘Poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity.’  The wandlike moments, he remembers, always came to him in haunts all remote indeed from poetry:  a sudden touch at his heart, and the air grows rhythmical, and seems a-ripple with dreams; and, albeit, in whatever room of dust or must he be, the song will find him, will throw her arms about him, so it seems, will close his eyes with her sweet breath, that he may open them upon the hidden stars.

‘Impromptus’ are the quackery of the poetaster.  One may take it for granted, as a general rule, that anything written ‘on the spot’ is worthless.  A certain young poet, who could when he liked do good things, printed some verses, which he declared in a sub-title were ’Written on the top of Snowdon in a thunderstorm.’  He asked an opinion, and one replied:  ‘Written on the top of Snowdon in a thunderstorm.’  The poet was naturally angry—­and yet, what need of further criticism?

The poet, when young, although as I said, he is not likely to fall into the foolishness of conceit which belongs to the poetaster, is yet too apt in his zeal of dedication to talk much of his ‘art,’ or, at least, think much; also to disparage life, and to pronounce much gratuitous absolution in the name of Poetry:—­

Did Burns drink and wench?—­yet he sang!

Did Coleridge opiate and neglect his family?—­yet he sang!!

Did Shelley—­well, whatever Shelley did of callous and foolish, the list is long—­yet he sang!!!

As years pass, however, he grows out of this stage, and, while regarding his art in a spirit of dedication equally serious, and how much saner, he comes to realise that, after all, art but forms one integral part, however great, of a healthy life, and that for the greatest artist there are still duties in life more imperative than any art can lay upon him.  It is a great hour when he rises up in his resolution first to be a man, in faith that, if he be such, the artist in him will look after itself—­first a man, and surely all the greater artist for being that; though if not, still a man.  That is the duty that lies’ next’ to all of us.  Do that, and, as we are told, the other will be clearer for us.  In that hour that earlier form of absolution will reverse itself on his lips into one of commination.  Did they sing?—­yet they sinned here and here; and as a man soweth, so shall he reap, singer or sot.  Lo! his songs are stars in heaven, but his sins are snakes in hell:  each shall bless and torment him in turn.