om another distinguished current volume, these:
"The Trance", "Lost", "Meeting"; from another, "After This, Sea", "Lineman
Calling", "Meaning Motion"; and from a fourth, "Terror", "Picnic
Remembered", "Eidolon", and "Monologue at Midnight". Here are individual
assertions, suggestive of individual ways of looking at things; here
are headings that signalize particular events in the authors'
experience,--moments' monuments. Beside them, Johnson's title, "The Vanity
of Human Wishes", looks very dogged and downright.

Titles are not poems but they have a barometric function. The modern
titles cited above are evocative of a world with which, for the past
century and a half, we have been growing increasingly familiar. This air
we are accustomed to breathe: it requires no unusual effort of adjustment
from us. We readily understand that we are being invited to participate in
a private experience and, by sharing it, to help in giving it as much
universality as may be. It is by no means easy for readers of to-day to
reverse the process, to start with the general and find in it their
personal account. We are more likely to feel a resentment, or at least a
prejudice, against the writer who solicits our attention to a topic
without even the pretense of novelty.

Johnson's generation would have found it equally hard to see the matter
from our point of view, or to allow that the authors of the poems named
above were being less than impudent or at best flippant in thus brazenly
obtruding their private experience, undisguised, before the reader. We
ought, moreover, to realize that in this judgment they would have the
suffrages of all previous generations, including the greatest writers,
from classical times down to their own. It is we who are singular, not
they. Quite apart from considerations of moral right or wrong, of artistic
good or bad, it obviously, therefore, behooves us to try to cultivate a
habit of mind free from initial bias against so large a proportion of
recorded testimony.

Very early in _The Rambler_ Johnson remarks characteristically that "men
more frequently require to be reminded than informed." He believed this,
and his generation believed it, because they thought that human nature
changed little from age to age. The problems of conduct that confront the
living individual have been faced countless times by his predecessors, and
the accumulated experience of mankind has arrived at conclusions which in
the main are j