After we had talked a little, I said to him:  “Come, praise me some new writers, you herald of the dawn!  You always do that when you come to see me, and you must do it now.”  He smiled secretly, and drew out a slim volume from his pocket and read me some verses; I will not be drawn into saying the name of the poet.

“How do you find that?” he said.

“Oh,” I said, “it is very good; but is it the finest gold?”

“Yes,” he said, “it is that.”  And he then read me some more.

“Now,” I said, “I will be frank with you.  That seems to me very musical and accomplished; but it has what is to me the one unpardonable fault in poetry:  it is literary.  He has heard and read, that poet, so much sweet and solemn verse, that his mind murmurs like a harp hung among the trees that are therein; the winds blow into music.  But I don’t want that; I want a fount of song, a spring of living water.”  He looked a little vexed at that, and read me a few more pages.  And then he went on to praise the work of two or three other writers, and added that he believed there was going to be a great outburst of poetry after a long frost.

“Well,” I said, “I am sure I hope so.  And if there is one thing in the world that I desire, it is that I may be able to recognise and love the new voices.”

And then I told him a story of which I often think.  When I was a young man, very much pre-occupied with Tennyson and Omar Khayyam and Swinburne, I went to stay with an elderly business man, a friend of my family.  He was a great stout, rubicund man, very good-natured, and he had a voice like the cry of an expiring mouse, shrill and thin.  We were sitting after dinner in his big dining-room, several of us, looking out into a wide, dusty garden, when the talk turned on books, and I suppose I praised Swinburne, for he asked me to say some, and I quoted the poem which says

        And even the weariest river
          Winds somewhere safe to sea.

He heard me attentively enough, and said it was pretty good; but then he said that it was nothing to Byron, and in his squeaky voice he quoted a quantity of Byron, whose poetry, I am sorry to say, I regarded as I might regard withered flowers or worse.  His eyes brimmed with tears, and they fell on to his shirt-front; and then he said decisively that there had been no poetry since Byron—­none at all.  Tennyson was mere word music, Browning was unintelligible, and so forth.  And I remember how, with the insolence of youth, I thought how dreadful it was that the old man should have lost all sympathy and judgment; because poetry then seemed to me a really important matter, full of tones and values.  I did not understand then, as I understand now, that it is all a question of signals and symbols, and that poetry is but, as the psalm says, what happens when one day telleth another and one night certifieth another.  I know now that there can be no deceit about poetry, and that