a divine Tuesday set apart for the admirable worship of
poetry, or of things esthetic. I can imagine Amy Lowell doing
something of this sort after the custom of those masters she so
admires, with her seemingly quenchless enthusiasms for all that is
modern in poetry. I think we shall wait long for that, for the time
when we shall have our best esthetics over the coffee, at the curbside
under the trees with the sun shining upon it, or the shadow of the
evening lending its sanction, under the magnetic influence of such a
one as Paul Fort or Francis Jammes, or Emile Verhaeren--as it was once
to be had among such as Verlaine, Baudelaire and that high company of
distinguished painters who are now famous among us.

The studio of Gertude Stein, that quiet yet always lively place in the
rue de Fleurus, is the only room I have ever been in where this spirit
was organized to a similar degree, for here you had the sense of the
real importance of painting, as it used to be thought of in the days
of Pissarro, Manet, Degas, and the others, and you had much, in all
human ways, out of an evening there, and, most of all, you had a fund
of good humour thrust at you, and the conversation took on, not the
quality of poetic prose spoken, as you had the quality of yourself and
others, a kind of William James intimacy, which, as everyone knows, is
style bringing the universe of ideas to your door in terms of your own
sensations. There may have been a touch of all this at the once famed
Brook Farm, but I fancy it was rather chill in its severity.

There is something of charm in the French idea of taking their
discussions to the sunlight or the shadow under the stars, either
within or outside the cafe, where you feel the passing of the world,
and the poetry is of one piece with life itself, not the result of
stuffy studios, and excessively ornate library corners, where books
crowd out the quality of people and things. You felt that the cafe was
the place for it, and if the acrobat came and sang, it was all of one
fabric and it was as good for the poetry, as it was for the eye and
the ear that absorbed it. Despite the different phases of the
spectacle of Tuesday, at the Closerie de Lilas, you had the feeling of
its splendour, its excellence, and, most of all, of its reality, its
relationship to every other phase of life, and not of the
hypersensitivity of the thing as we still consider it among ourselves
in general; and if you heard the name of