k lines of coast, below the great marble crags of Carrara,
rising dim in the twilight--

"Is that the place where my friends will pick me up?"

"Yes," answered Baldwin, "that's the place. You will be picked up there
if you choose."

"I must, you know." And Cyril looked astonished, as if for the first
time it struck him that there might be no _must_ in the matter. "I
must--at least, I suppose I ought to--go back to England with them."

"You know that best," replied Baldwin, shortly. "But before we get
there I want to finish what we were saying about the moral value of
poetry, if you don't mind. I gave you the instance of Whitman and the
mystico-sensual school merely because it is one of the most evident;
but it is only one of many I could give you of the truth of what I
said, that if a poet, inasmuch as he is a poet, has--what the painter,
or sculptor, or musician, inasmuch as they are such, have not--a keener
sense of moral right and wrong than other men, it is because his
art requires it. Consider what it is deliberately to treat of human
character and emotion and action; consider what a strange chaos,
an often inextricable confusion of clean and foul, of healthy and
pestilent, you get among, in penetrating into the life of the human
soul; consider that the poet must pick his way through all this, amidst
very loathsome dangers which he often cannot foresee; and not alone,
but carrying in his moral arms the soul of his reader--of each of his
thousands of readers--a soul which, if he see not clearly his way, if he
miss his footing, or tread in the soft, sinking soil (soft with filthy
bogs), may be bespattered and soiled, perhaps for ever--may be sucked
into the swamp pool or poisoned by the swamp air; and that he must thus
carry, not one soul, but thousands of souls, unknown to him--souls in
many cases weak, sometimes already predisposed to some loathsome moral
malady, and which, by a certain amount of contact with what to the poet
himself might be innocuous, may be condemned to life-long disease. I do
not think that the poet's object is to moralize mankind; but I think
that the materials with which he must work are such that, while
practising his art, he may unconsciously do more mischief than all the
professed moralists in Christendom can consciously do good. The poet
is the artist, remember, who deliberately chooses as material for
his art the feelings and actions of man; he is the artist who plays
his melodies, n