ad Swinburne surreptitiously and smoked a cigarette in
private now reads Havelock Ellis on summer porches, and puffs at a
cigarette in public whenever she feels like it. She is really no more
advanced than the girl of the period of the eighties, and not any more
astonishing. It's the same old girl! And the young men who discovered
Swinburne and Rossetti, and who were rather bored by the thinness of
their aftermath, the aesthetic poets, really got more colour and
amazement and delight out of the flashing of the meteors than the youth
of to-day seem to get. It was the fashion then to be blas['e] and cynical
and bored with life; but nobody was really bored because there were too
many amusing and delightful things in the world--as there are now.

Joaquin Miller, with his gorgeous parrots and burning Southern lights
and his intensities and his simulated passion, did not last long. In
England he was looked on as a typical American poet, more decent than
Walt Whitman, less vulgar, but with the charm Whitman had for the
English--that no Englishman could ever be like him! In England they
wanted the Americans raw and fresh and with a savage flavour about them.

I read the poems of Richard Watson Gilder, of Edith Thomas, of Robert
Underwood Johnson--whose "Italian Rhapsody" and "The Winter Hour" can
never be forgotten--and certain verses of Edmund Clarence Stedman. But
_les jeunes_ prefer the new verse makers. There is even a kind of cult
for the Imagists. A spokesman for the Imagists tells us briefly that
"free verse" is a term that may be attached to all that increasing
amount of writing whose cadence is more marked, more definite, and
closer knit than that of prose, but which is not so violently or so
obviously accented as the so-called "regular verse." Richard Aldington's
"Childhood" is a very typical example of _vers libre_. It is also an
Imagist poem. It will be remarked that it is so free that there is no
cadence that any musician could find. It is a pretty little joyful
trifle!

There was nothing to see,
Nothing to do,
Nothing to play with,
Except that in an empty room upstairs
There was a large tin box
Containing reproductions of the Magna Charta,
Of the Declaration of Independence,
And of a letter from Raleigh after the Armada;
There were also several packets of stamps,
Yellow and blue Guatemala parrots,
Blue stags and red baboons and birds from Sarawak,
Indians and