In so far as one may see turning points in a tangle of yarn, or count dewdrops on a morning cobweb, I may say that a few evenings with my friend J——­ were the decisive vibration that moved one more minor poet toward the privilege and penalty of Parnassus.  One cannot nicely decipher such fragile causes and effects.  It was a year later before the matter became serious enough to enforce abandoning library copies of Keats and buying an edition of my own.  And this, too, may have been not unconnected with the gracious influence of the other sex as exhibited in a neighbouring athenaeum; and was accompanied by a gruesome spate of florid lyrics:  some (happily) secret, and some exposed with needless hardihood in a college magazine.  The world, which has looked leniently upon many poetical minorities, regards such frenzies with tolerant charity and forgetfulness.  But the wretch concerned may be pardoned for looking back in a mood of lingering enlargement.  As Sir Philip Sidney put it, “Self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous wherein ourselves be parties.”

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There is a vast deal of nonsense written and uttered about poetry.  In an age when verses are more noisily and fluently circulated than ever before, it might seem absurd to plead in the Muse’s defence.  Yet poetry and the things poets love are pitifully weak to-day.  In essence, poetry is the love of life—­not mere brutish tenacity of sensation, but a passion for all the honesties that make life free and generous and clean.  For two thousand years poets have mocked and taunted the cruelties and follies of men, but to what purpose?  Wordsworth said:  “In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.”  Sometimes it seems as though “things violently destroyed,” and the people who destroy them, are too strong for the poets.  Where, now, do we see any cohesive binding together of humanity?  Are we nearer these things than when Wordsworth and Coleridge walked and talked on the Quantock Hills or on that immortal road “between Porlock and Linton”?  Hardy writes “The Dynasts,” Joseph Conrad writes his great preface to “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” but do the destroyers hear them?  Have you read again, since the War, Gulliver’s “Voyage to the Houyhnhnms,” or Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”?  These men wrote, whether in verse or prose, in the true spirit of poets; and Swift’s satire, which the text-book writers all tell you is so gross and savage as to suggest the author’s approaching madness, seems tender and suave by comparison with what we know to-day.

Poetry is the log of man’s fugitive castaway soul upon a doomed and derelict planet.  The minds of all men plod the same rough roads of sense; and in spite of much knavery, all win at times “an ampler ether, a diviner air.”  The great poets, our masters, speak out of that clean freshness of perception.  We hear their voices—­