nes; one was "God Save the Queen" and the other wasn't. But when
music is broken into independent rhythms, irregular and oddly related
phrases, it is only the person exceptionally endowed who can remember
it without prolonged study. The very first audience who heard
_Rigoletto_ came away humming "Donna e mobile." And the very last
audience who heard _Pelleas et Melisande_ came away humming--"Donna e
mobile." It is the law. Needless to say, I enjoyed _Pelleas et
Melisande_, but I cannot whistle it. What I recall is a mood, a
picture, a vague ecstasy, a hushed terror. It was James Huneker, was
it not, who, when asked what he thought of the opera, replied that
Mary Garden's hair was superb.

"But the music?" he was urged.

"Oh, the music," said he, "--the music didn't bother me."

But the new poetry does bother me, because I strive to remember not
the mere mood or picture of the poem, but the actual words which
created them, and I cannot. I want to compel again, at will, the
actual poetic experience, and I cannot, without carrying a library in
my pocket. The words hover, sometimes, just beyond the threshold of my
brain, like a forgotten name ("If you hadn't asked me, I could have
told you"--you know the sensation); but they never come. I have no
comfort of them in the still hours of the day when I would be
whispering them to myself. Instead, I have to fall back upon the
old-fashioned Golden Treasury. I cannot remember a single line that
Amy Lowell has written about her Roxbury garden, but I shall never
forget what Wordsworth said about that field of gold he passed; I
repeat his lines, and then my heart, too, with pleasure fills and
dances with his daffodils.

It is an immemorial delight, this pleasure in the lingering line, in
the haunting couplet, in the quatrain that will not let you forget. By
sacrificing it, the new poetry has sacrificed something precious,
something that a common instinct of mankind demands of the minstrel.
It will not suffice for the new poets to deny that they are minstrels,
to assert that they write for the eye, not speak for the ear, that it
is not their mission to emit pretty sounds but so to present their
vision of the world that it shall etch itself on men's minds with the
bite of reality. Such a creed is admirable, but defective. It is
defective because, in the first place, if the new poets did not write
for the ear quite as much as the old poets, there would be no excuse
even for rhythm.