tches the street from her latticed
window. Shakespeare was _bon vivant_, a player, therefore a brief
chronicler of that time and of all times. He floated in people as
birds in air. Dramatists have need to study men and women as a
sculptor does anatomy. Seclusions are not the qualifications for
dramatic art. Dryden was court follower and sycophant and a literary
debauchee. Milton was publicist. Burns, loving and longing for courts
and society, was enforced in his seclusion, and therefore angry at it.
Wordsworth dwelt apart from men, as one who lives far from a public
thoroughfare, where neither the dust nor bustle of travel can touch his
bower of quiet; in its quality of isolation, Grasmere was an island in
remote seas. Keats was a lad, dreaming in some dim Greek temple,
listening to a fountain's plash at midnight which never whitened into
dawn.

Nor does there seem to be reasonable room for doubt that poetry, aside
from the drama, gains by seclusion and solitude. Much of Bayard
Taylor's verse has a delicious flavor of poetry. He could write
dreamily, as witness "The Metempsychosis of the Pine" and "Hylas," or
he brings us into an Arab's tent as fellow-guest with him; but he
belonged too much to the world. Traveler, newspaper correspondent,
translator, ambassador, he was all these, and his varied exploits and
attrition of the crowded world hindered the cadences of his poetry.
William Cullen Bryant lost as poet by being journalist, his vocation
drying up the fountains of his poetry. America's representative poet,
James Russell Lowell, was editor, essayist, diplomat, poet,--in every
department distinguished. His essay on Dante ranks him among the great
expositors of that melancholy Florentine. Yet who of us has not wished
he might have consecrated himself to poetry as priest to the altar? We
gained in the publicist and essayist, but lost from the poet. And our
ultimate loss out-topped our gain; for essayists and ambassadors are
more numerous than poets. Had Lowell been a man of one service, and
that service poetry, what might he not have left us as a poet's
bequest? Would he had lived in some forest primeval, from whose
shadows mountains climbed to meet the dawns, and streams stood in
silver pools or broke into laughter on the stones, and where winds
among the pines were constant ministrants of melody! Solitudes
minister to poets. You can hear a fountain best at midnight, because
then quiet rules.

T