esire to moralize he demoralizes; in his desire to
sanctify one item of life, he casts aside, he overlooks, forgets, all
that which in life is already possessed of holiness. Thus my young poet,
in wishing to improve mankind, to raise it, undoes for the time being
that weary work of the hundreds of centuries which have slowly changed
lust into love, the male and female into a man and a woman, the life of
the body into the life of the soul; poetry, one of the highest human
products, has, as it were, undone the work of evolution; poetry, which
is essentially a thing of the self-conscient intellect, has taken us
back to the time when creatures with two legs and no tail could not
speak, but only whine and yell and sob--a mode of converse, by the way,
more than sufficient for the intercourse of what he is pleased to call
the typical Bride and Bridegroom."

They had got out of the strange expanse of brown and green swamp, and
after traversing a strip of meagre redeemed land, with stunted trees and
yellowish vines, had reached the long narrow line of pine woods which
met the beach. They passed slowly through the midst of the woods,
brushing the rain-drops off the short, bright, green pines, their wheels
creaking over the slippery fallen needles embedded in the sand; while
the setting sun fell in hazy yellow beams through the brushwood, making
the crisp tree-tufts sparkle like green spun-glass, and their scaly
trunks flush rosy; and the stormy sea roared on the sands close by.

"I think your young poet ought to be birched," remarked Cyril; "and if
anything could add to my aversion, not for poetry, but for the poetic
profession, this would which you have just told me. You see how right I
was in saying that I would have more moral satisfaction in being a
French cook than in being a poet."

"By no means," answered Baldwin. "In the first place, my young poet
ought not to be birched; he ought to be made to reflect, to ask himself
seriously and simply, in plain prose, what ideal of life he has been
setting before his readers. He ought to be shown that a poet, inasmuch
as he is the artist whose material is human feeling and action, is not
as free an artist as the mere painter, or sculptor, or composer; he
ought to be made to understand that now-a-days, when the old rules of
conduct, religious and social, are for ever being questioned, every man
who writes of human conduct is required, is bound, to have sound ideas
on the subject: tha