y cheerful mien:
Possessing beauty thou possessest all;
Pause at that goal, nor farther push thy quest.

It would not be just to the present state of academic instruction in
literature to illustrate it by such an extreme instance as this of the
damage the educated mind--debauched with analysis--is capable of doing
to the reading habit. It is probable that a large proportion of the
teachers of literature in the United States, both out of their sense of
John Keats and out of respect to themselves, would have publicly
resented this astonishing exhibit of the extreme literary-academic mind
in a prominent journal, had they not suspected that its editor, having
discovered a literary-academic mind that could take itself as seriously
as this, had deliberately brought it out as a spectacle. It could do no
harm to Keats, certainly, or to any one else, and would afford an
infinite deal of amusement--the journal argued--to let a mind like this
clatter down a column to oblivion. So it did. It was taken by all
concerned, teachers, critics, and observers alike, as one of the more
interesting literary events of the season.

Unfortunately, however, entertainments of this kind have a very serious
side to them. It is one thing to smile at an individual when one knows
that standing where he does he stands by himself, and another to smile
at an individual when one knows that he is not standing by himself, that
he is a type, that there must be a great many others like him or he
would not be standing where he does at all. When a human being is seen
taking his stand over his own soul in public print, summing up its
emptiness there, and gloating over it, we are in the presence of a
disheartening fact. It can be covered up, however, and in what, on the
whole, is such a fine, true-ringing, hearty old world as this, it need
not be made much of; but when we find that a mind like this has been
placed at the head of a Department of Poetry in a great, representative
American university, the last thing that should be done with it is to
cover it up. The more people know where the analytical mind is
to-day--where it is getting to be--and the more they think what its
being there means, the better. The signs of the times, the destiny of
education, and the fate of literature are all involved in a fact like
this. The mere possibility of having the analysing-grinding mind engaged
in teaching a spontaneous art in a great educational institution would
be