,
clutching perilously at the hem of his thought. Nay. Mr. Lee, frown not:
I say it in sincere devotion. If there is one man and one book this
country needs, now, it is Gerald Stanley Lee and "WE." Set me upon a
coral atoll with that volume, I will repopulate the world with
dictionaries, and beget lusty tomes. It is a breeding-ground for a
whole new philosophy of heaven, hell, and the New Haven Railroad.

But what I was going to say when I lit my pipe was this: had I the
stature (not the leanness, God forbid: sweet are the uses of obesity) of
Mr. Lee, I could find in any clodded trifle the outlets of sky my
yearning mind covets: hay fever would lead me by prismatic omissions and
plunging ellipses of thought to the vaster spirals and eddies of
all-viewing Mind. So does Mr. Lee proceed, weaving a new economics and a
new bosom for advertisiarchs in the mere act of brushing his teeth. But
alas, the recurring explosions of the loathsome and intellectual disease
keep my nose on the grindstone--or handkerchief. Do I begin to soar on
upward pinion, nose tweaks me back to sealpackerchief.

The trouble with Mr. Lee is that he is a kind of Emerson; a
constitutional ascete or Brahmin, battling with the staggering
voluptuosities of his word-sense; a De Quincey needing no opium to set
him swooning. In fact, he is a poet, and has no control over his
thoughts. A poet may begin by thinking about a tortoise, or a
locomotive, or a piece of sirloin, and in one whisk of Time his mind has
shot up to the conceptions of Eternity, Transportation, and Nourishment:
his cortex coruscates and suppurates with abstract thought; words
assail him in hordes, and in a flash he is down among them, overborne
and fighting for his life. Mr. Lee finds that millionaires are bound
down and tethered and stifled by their limousines and coupons and
factories and vast estates. But Mr. Lee himself, who is a millionaire
and landed proprietor of ideas, is equally the slave of his thronging
words. They cluster about him like barnacles, nobly and picturesquely
impeding his progress. He is a Laocoon wrestling with serpentine
sentences. He ought to be confined to an eight-hour paragraph.

All this is not so by the way as you think. For if the poet is one who
has lost control of his thoughts, the hay fever sufferer has lost
control of his nose. His mucous membrane acts like a packet of Roman
candles, and who is he to say it nay? And our village is bounded on the
north b