h a rude utterance for some
noble ideas. That he chose at times to put into speech sensual dreams or
passing shadows of evil thoughts astonished us no more than the
existence of the photographic reproductions, then the fashion, of the
gargoyles from the Cathedral of Notre Dame, or the strange and very
improper representations of the Seven Deadly Sins which were sometimes
carved on the backs and the undersides of the stalls in old cathedrals.
We Philadelphians thought that it was not a gentlemanly performance.
There were persons who wallowed in pools of de-civilization, and, though
they might whisper of their mental wallowings in intimate circles, there
was no point whatever in putting them into print. But the great
passages--there are very many--and the noble complete poems--there are a
few--of Whitman were chosen and recited and enjoyed.

Besides, Whitman lived just across the Delaware River, and one could
meet him almost at any time in a street car or lounging about his haunts
in Camden. As he was part of our everyday life he did not for us
represent anything essentially new. When Swinburne and Rossetti and the
Preraphaelites, however, came into our possession, it was quite another
thing! There was no Whitman movement among our young. There was a
marked, but not concentrated, reflection of the Preraphaelites.

Swinburne's music took us by storm! It did not mean that a young man had
a depraved mind because he spouted "Faustine" or quoted verse after
verse of the roses and raptures of Swinburne. It simply meant that a
breath of rich, sensuous odours from an exotic island had swept across
the conventional lamp-posts and well-trimmed gardens of his life. I
wonder if any young man feels to-day, in reading Masefield's poems, or
Walter de la Mare's, or Seeger's, or Amy Lowell's, or Robert Frost's, or
even Alfred Noyes's, the thrill that stirred us when we heard the
choruses in "Atalanta in Calydon" or Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel"? And
there was William Morris and "The Earthly Paradise!"

The first appearance of Kipling's poems recalled the old thrills of
"new" poets, but of late, though the prospects of poetry are beginning
to revive, no very modern poet seems to have become a part of the daily
lives of the young, who declare that the world is changed, and that the
Old hold no torches for them by which they can discover what they really
want! The more things change, the more they remain the same! And the
young woman who re