iend, "You will observe at the end of this, 'How a solitary life
engenders pride and egotism!' True--I know it does: but this pride and
egotism will enable me to write finer things than anything else could,
so I will indulge it." [Footnote: Letter to John Taylor, August 23,
1819.] No matter how modest one may be about his work after it is
completed, a sense of its worth must be with one at the time of
composition, else he will not go to the trouble of recording and
preserving it.

Unless the writer schools himself to keep this conviction out of his
verse, it is likely to flower in self-confident poetry of the classic
type, so characteristic of the Elizabethan age. This has such a long
tradition behind it that it seems almost stereotyped, wherever it
appears in our period, especially when it is promising immortality to a
beloved one. We scarcely heed such verses as the lines by Landor,

Well I remember how you smiled
To see me write your name upon
The soft sea-sand, "O! what a child,
You think you're writing upon stone!"
I have since written what no tide
Shall ever wash away, what men
Unborn shall read, o'er ocean wide,
And find Ianthe's name again,

or Francis Thompson's sonnet sequence, _Ad Amicam_, which expresses
the author's purpose to

Fling a bold stave to the old bald Time,
Telling him that he is too insolent
Who thinks to rase thee from my heart or rhyme,
Whereof to one because thou life hast given,
The other yet shall give a life to thee,
Such as to gain, the prowest swords have striven,
And compassed weaker immortality,

or Yeats' lines _Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved_,
wherein he takes pride in the reflection:

Weigh this song with the great and their pride;
I made it out of a mouthful of air;
Their children's children shall say they have lied.

But a more vibrantly personal note breaks out from time to time in the
most original verse of the last century, as in Wordsworth's testimony,

Yet to me I feel
That an internal brightness is vouchsafed
That must not die,
[Footnote: _Home at Grasmere_.]

or in Walt Whitman's injunction:

Recorders ages hence,
Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive
Exterior. I will tell you what to say of me.
[Footnote: See also, _Long Long Hence_.]

Nowadays, in fact, even minor poets for the most part frankly avow the
importance of their works. We find George Edward Woodberry in the