and feed
for his horse. We made Bryant ruin a gift as elemental as
Wordsworth's, in journalism; Holmes, visit patients at all hours of
the day and night; Poe, take to newspaper offices and drink. We made
Whitman drive nails, set type and drudge in the Indian Bureau in
Washington, from which he was dismissed for writing the most original
and the most poetic of American books. Later he was rescued from want
only by the humiliation of a public European subscription. Lanier we
allowed to waste away in a dingy lawyer's office, then kill himself so
fast by teaching and writing railway advertisements and playing the
flute in a city orchestra that he was forced to defer composing
"Sunrise" until too weak with fever to carry his hand to his lips. And
this was eleven years after that brave spirit's single cry of
reproach:

"Why can we poets dream us beauty, so,
But cannot dream us bread?"

With Lanier the physical exhaustion incident to the modern speeding-up
process began to be more apparent. Edward Rowland Sill we did away
with in his early prime through journalism and teaching. We curbed
and pinched and stunted the promising art of Richard Watson Gilder by
piling upon him several men's editorial work. We created a poetic
resemblance between Arthur Upson and the hero of "The Divine Fire" by
employing him in a bookstore. We made William Vaughn Moody teach in a
city environment utterly hostile to his poetry, and later set the hand
that gave us "An Ode in Time of Hesitation" to the building of popular
melodrama. These are only a tithe of the things that we have done to
the hardiest of those benefactors of ours:

"The poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight."

It is not pleasant to dwell on the fate of those less sturdy ones who
have remained mute, inglorious Miltons for lack of a little practical
appreciation and a small part of a small fresh-air fund.

So far as I know, Thomas Bailey Aldrich is the only prominent figure
among the poets of our elder generations who was given the means of
devoting himself entirely to his art. And even _his_ fortune was not
left to him by his practical, poetry-loving friend until so late in
the day that his creative powers had already begun to decline through
age and over-much magazine editing.

More than almost any other civilized nation we have earned Allen
Upward's reproach in "The New Word":

There are two kinds of human outcasts. Man, in h