brow
The cynic, Art, has left no wrinkles!
For you're a poet to the core,
No ghouls can from the Muses win you;
So throw your cap i' the air once more,
And show the joy of earth that's in you!

By Heaven! we want you one and all,
For Hypochondria is reigning--
The Mater Dolorosa's squall
Makes Nature hideous with complaining!
Ah! who will paint the Face that smiled
When Art was virginal and vernal--
The pure Madonna with her Child,
Pure as the light, and as eternal!

Pest on these dreary, dolent airs!
Confound these funeral pomps and poses!
Is Life Dyspepsia's and Despair's,
And Love's complexion all _chlorosis_?
A lie! There's Health, and Mirth, and Song,
The World still laughs, and goes a-Maying--
The dismal, droning, doleful Throng
Are only smuts in sunshine playing!

Play up, ye horns of Fairyland!
Shine out, O sun, and planets seven!
Beyond these clouds a beckoning Hand
Gleams from the lattices of Heaven!
The World's alive--still quick, not dead,
It needs no Undertaker's warning;
So put the Dismal Throng to bed,
And wake once more to Light and Morning!

* * *

[1] Mathilde Serao, an Italian novelist.

[2] A Spanish novelist.

[3] Verlaine and Rimbaud, two poets of the Parisian Decadence.

[4] A Norwegian playwright.

[5] Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, and Pierre Loti, novelists of the
Decadence.

[6] Catulle Mendes, a Parisian poet and novelist.

[7] Jean Richepin, ditto.

[8] Mr. Oscar Wilde.

[9] Mr. William Archer, a newspaper critic.

[10] Mr. George Moore, an author and newspaper critic.

NOTE.--These verses refer to a literary phenomenon that will in
time become historical, that phenomenon being the sudden growth, in
all parts of Europe, of a fungus-literature bred of Foulness and
Decay; and contemporaneously, the intrusion into all parts of human
life of a Calvinistic yet materialistic Morality. This literature
of a sunless Decadence has spread widely, by virtue of its own
uncleanness, and its leading characteristics are gloom, ugliness,
prurience, preachiness, and weedy flabbiness of style. That it has
not flourished in Great Britain, save among a small and discredited
Cockney minority, is due to the inhe