e, until we have succeeded either in
accomplishing the readjustment, or in spending more time in the
country, the appreciation of poetry has continued to suffer.

Even in the country, it is, of course, perfectly true that life spins
faster now than it used to--what with telephones and inter-urban
trolleys, the motor, and the R.F.D. But this rural progress has
arrived with no such stunning abruptness as to outdistance our powers
of readjustment. When we go from city to country we recede to a rate
of living with which our nervous systems can comfortably fall in, and
still control for the use of the mind and spirit a margin of that
delicious vital bloom which resembles the ring of the overtones in
some beautiful voice.

But how is it practicable to keep this margin in the city, when the
roar of noisy traffic over noisy pavements, the shrieks of newsboy and
peddler, the all-pervading chronic excitement, the universal
obligation to "step lively," even at a funeral, are every instant
laying waste our conscious or unconscious powers? How are we to give
the life of the spirit its due of poetry when our precious margin is
forever leaking away through lowered vitality and even sickness due to
lack of sleep, unhygienic surroundings, constant interruption (or the
expectation thereof), and the impossibility of relaxation owing to the
never-ending excitement and interest and sexual stimulus of the great
human pageant--its beauty and suggestiveness?

Apart from the general destruction of the margin of energy, one
special thing that the new form of city life does to injure poetry is
to keep uppermost in men's consciousness a feverish sense of the
importance of the present moment. We might call this sense the
journalistic spirit of the city. How many typical metropolitans one
knows who are forever in a small flutter of excitement over whatever
is just happening, like a cub reporter on the way to his first fire,
or a neuraesthete--if one may coin a word--who perceives a spider on
her collarette. This habit of mind soon grows stereotyped, and is, of
course, immensely stimulated by the multitudinous editions of our
innumerable newspapers. The city gets one to living so intensely in
the present minute, and often in the very most sensational second of
that minute, that one grows impatient of the "olds," and comes to
regard a constantly renewed and increased dose of "news" as the only
present help in a chronic time of trouble. This is a ki