larity escape us in our study to make the form perfect. We cut out
the tall word; we restrained the straining; we tried to keep the wording
within the bounds of the dictionary; we wished for beauty in our work so
much that our very roughness was the effect of hammering; the grain we
left was where we had used the file to produce it."

"Was it? And you say that with these new fellows it isn't so?"

"Well, what do you say to such a word as 'dankening,' which occurred in
a very good landscape?"

"One such word in a hundred poems?"

"One such word in a million would have been too many. It made me feel
that they would all have liked to say 'dankening,' or something of the
sort. And in the new poets, on other occasions, I have found faulty
syntax, bad rhymes, limping feet. The editors are to blame for that,
when it happens. The editor who printed 'dankening' was more to blame
than the poet who wrote it, and loved the other ugly word above all his
other vocables." The elder poet was silent, and the other took fresh
courage. "Yes, I say it! You were wrong in your praise of the present
magazine verse at the cost of that in our day. When we were commencing
poets, the young or younger reputations were those of Stedman, of Bayard
Taylor, of the Stoddards, of Aldrich, of Celia Thaxter, of Rose Terry,
of Harriet Prescott, of Bret Harte, of Charles Warren Stoddard, of the
Piatts, of Fitz James O'Brien, of Fitzhugh Ludlow, of a dozen more, whom
the best of the newest moderns cannot rival. These were all delicate and
devoted and indefatigable artists and lovers of form. It cannot do the
later generation any good to equal them with ours."

"There is something in what you say." The elder poet was silent for a
time. Then he asked, "Out of the hundred poems you read in your fifty
magazines, how many did you say were what you would call good?"

His junior counted up, and reported, "About twenty-four."

"Well, don't you call that pretty fair, in a hundred? I do. Reflect that
these were all the magazines of one month, and it is probable that there
will be as many good poems in the magazines of every month in the year.
That will give us two hundred and eighty-eight good poems during 1907.
Before the first decade of the new century is ended, we shall have had
eleven hundred and fifty-two good magazine poems. Do you suppose that as
many good magazine poems were written during the last four years of the
first decade of the eighteenth century