is march
upward out of the deep into the light, throws out a vanguard
and a rearguard, and both are out of step with the main
body. Humanity condemns equally those who are too good for
it, and those who are too bad. On its Procrustean bed the
stunted members of the race are racked; the giants are cut
down. It puts to death with the same ruthless equality the
prophet and the atavist. The poet and the drunkard starve
side by side.... Literature is the chief ornament of
humanity; and perhaps humanity never shows itself uglier
than when it stands with the pearl shining on its forehead,
and the pearl-maker crushed beneath its heel.... England
will always have fifteen thousand a year for some
respectable clergyman; she will never have it for Shelley.

Yes, but how incomparably better England has treated her poets than
America has treated hers! What convenient little plums, as De Quincey
somewhat wistfully remarked, were always being found for Wordsworth
just at the psychological moment; and they were not withheld,
moreover, until he was full of years and honors. Indeed, we owe this
poet to the poet-by-proxy of whom Wordsworth wrote, in "The Prelude":

"He deemed that my pursuits and labours, lay
Apart from all that leads to wealth, or even
A necessary maintenance insures
Without some hazard to the finer sense."

How tenderly the frail bodies of Coleridge and of Francis Thompson
were cared for by their appreciators. How potently the Civil List and
the laureateship have helped a long, if most uneven, line of England's
singers. Over against our solitary ageing Aldrich, how many great
English poets like Byron, Keats, the Brownings, Tennyson, and
Swinburne have found themselves with small but independent incomes,
free to give their whole unembarrassed souls and all that in them was
to their art. And all this since the close of the age of patronage!

Why have we never had a Wordsworth, or a Browning? For one thing,
because this nation of philanthropists has been too thoughtless to
found the small fellowship in creative poetry which might have freed a
Wordsworth of ours from communion with a cash-book to wander chanting
his new-born lines among the dreamy Adirondack lakes or the frowning
Sierras; or that might have sought out our Browning in his grocery
store and built him a modest retreat among the Thousand Islands. If
not too thoughtless to act