ny healthy intelligence.

I do not question that the closing up of the poetic field, the depending
more and more completely for artistic effect upon an 'effusion of natural
sensibility', will isolate the poet from his fellows. He will be tempted,
in the pursuit of the symbol which illustrates his emotion, to draw
farther and farther away from contact with the world. He will wrap his
singing-robes not over his limbs only, but over his face, and treat his
readers with exemplary disdain. We must be prepared, or our successors
must, to find frequently revealed the kind of poet who not merely sees
nothing superior to himself, but nothing except himself. I am not
concerned to say that this will be unfortunate or blameworthy; the
moralist of the future must attend to that. But I can believe that this
unyielding and inscrutable attitude may produce some fine artistic
effects. I can believe that both intensity and dignity may be gained by
this sacrifice of the plainer human responsibilities, although I am not
prepared to say at what loss of other qualities. It is clear that such a
writer will not allow the public to dictate to him the nature or form of
his lyric message, and he will have to depend for success entirely on the
positive value of his verse.

The isolation of the poets of the future is likely to lead them to band
themselves more closely together for mutual protection against the
reasonable world. The mystery of verse is like other abstruse and
recondite mysteries,--it strikes the ordinary fleshly man as absurd. The
claim of the poet on human sympathy, if we regard it merely from the
world's standpoint, is gratuitous, vague, and silly. In an entirely
sensible and well-conducted social system, what place will there be for
the sorrows of Tasso and Byron, for the rage of Dante, for the misanthropy
of Alfred de Vigny, for the perversity of Verlaine, for the rowdiness of
Marlowe?--the higher the note of the lyre, the more ridiculous is the
attitude of the lyrist, and the coarse public applauds the violence of
Diogenes when he tramples on the pride of the poets with a greater pride
than theirs. I cannot help thinking that this attitude of the sacred bard,
maundering from the summit of his ivory tower, and hollowed out and made
haggard by a kind of sublime moral neuralgia, will have to be abandoned as
a relic of the dead romantic past. So far as it is preserved by the poets
of the future it will be peculiar to those monaster