wise be given as I read. The whole must be the
impression, not any part. It must be felt as a whole, or it is not felt
at all. Until the last line is read no judgment can be formed."

This was discouraging and even depressing, but everybody promised.
Minola in particular began to fear that poets were not so much less
objectionable than other men as she had hoped. She could not tell why,
but as she listened to the child of genius she was filled with a strange
memory of Mr. Augustus Sheppard. Everything that seemed formal and
egotistic reminded her of Mr. Augustus Sheppard.

"Then," continued Herbert, "when I have finished the last line, you will
perhaps allow me to leave you at once, without formality, and without
even speaking? I ask for no sudden judgment; that I shall hear another
time; too soon, perhaps," and he indulged in a faint smile. "But I
prefer to go at once, when I have read a poem; it is a peculiarity of
mine," and he passed his hand through his hair. "Reading excites me, and
I am overwrought. It may not be so with others, but it is so with me."

"I can quite understand," the good-natured Victor hastened to say.
"Quite natural--quite so. I have often worked myself into such a state
of excitement, thinking of things--not poetry, of course, but colonial
affairs, and such dry stuff--that I have to go out at night, perhaps,
and walk in the cool air, and recover myself. Don't you feel so
sometimes, Miss Grey?"

"Oh, no; I am neither poet nor politician, and I have nothing to think
about." At the moment she thought Blanchet a sham, and Heron rather a
weak and foolish person for encouraging him. What would you have of men?

"I have felt so often," Mary Blanchet said with a gentle sigh.

Miss Grey did not doubt that people felt so; that everybody might feel
so under appropriate conditions. It was the deliberate arranging of
preliminaries by Mr. Blanchet that vexed her; it seemed so like
affectation and play-acting. She was prepared to think his poetry
rubbish.

It was not rubbish, however; not mere rubbish, by any means. Mr.
Blanchet had a considerable mastery of the art of arranging together
melodious and penetrating words, and he caught up cleverly and adopted
the prevailing idea and purpose of the small new group of yet hardly
known artists in verse and color, to whom it was his pride to belong.
His poems belonged to what might be called the literature of disease. In
principle, they said to corruption, "T