ition begins,
inspiration is already on the decline."

That I believe is as true as it is beautiful. The best poetry is
written in a sudden rapture, and probably needs but little
reconsideration or retouching. One knows for instance how the _Ode to
the Nightingale_ was scribbled by Keats on a spring morning, in an
orchard at Hampstead, and so little regarded that it was rescued by a
friend from the volume into which he had crammed the slips of
manuscript. Of course poets vary greatly in their method; but one may
be sure of this, that no poem which was not a great poem in its first
transcript, ever becomes a great poem by subsequent handling. There
are poets indeed like Rossetti and FitzGerald who made a worse poem
out of a better by scrupulous correction; and the first drafts of
great poems are generally the finest poems of all. A poem has
sometimes been improved by excision, notably in the case of Tennyson,
whose abandoned stanzas, printed in his Life, show how strong his
instinct was for what was best and purest. A great poet, for instance,
never, like a lesser poet, keeps an unsatisfactory stanza for the sake
of a good line. Tennyson, in a fine homely image, said that a poem
must have a certain curve of its own, like the curve of the rind of a
pared apple thrown on the floor. It must have a perfect evolution and
progress, and this can sometimes be best arrived at by the omission
of stanzas in which the inconstant or flagging mind turned aside from
its design.

But it is certain that if the poet gets so much into the habit of
writing poetry, that even when he has no sense of inspiration he must
still write to satisfy a craving, the result will be worthless, as it
too often was in the case of Wordsworth. Because such poems become
literary instead of poetical; and literary poetry has no
justification.

If we take a book like Rossetti's _House of Life_, we shall find that
certain sonnets stand out with a peculiar freshness and brightness, as
in the golden sunlight of an autumn morning; while many of the sonnets
give us the sense of slow and gorgeous evolution, as if contrived by
some poetical machine. I was interested to find, in studying the
_House of Life_ carefully, that all the finest poems are early work;
and when I came to look at the manuscripts, I was rather horrified to
see what an immense amount of alternatives had been produced. There
would be, for instance, no less than eight or nine of those great
slowl