d a place in the
bread-line, and send the mounted police to ride down his socialistic
meetings in Union Square. No! poetry and most other forms of higher
education have always had to be subsidized--and probably always will.
When wisely subsidized, however, this art is very likely to repay its
support in princely fashion. In fact, I know of no other investment
to-day that would bid fair to bring us in so many thousand per cent.
of return as a small fresh-air fund for poets.

We Americans are rather apt to complain of the comparatively poor,
unoriginal showing which our poets have as yet made among those of
other civilized nations. We are quietly disgusted that only two of
all our bards have ever made their work forcibly felt in Europe; and
that neither Poe nor Whitman has ever profoundly influenced the great
masses of his own people.

Despite our splendid inheritance, our richly mingled blood, our
incomparably stimulating New World atmosphere, why has our poetry made
such a meager showing among the nations? The chief reason is obvious.
_We have been unwilling to let our poets live while they were working
for us._ True, we have the reputation of being an open-handed, even an
extravagantly generous folk. But thriftiness in small things often
goes with an extravagant disposition, much as manifestations of piety
often accompany wickedness like flying buttresses consciously placed
outside the edifice. We have spent millions on bronze and marble
book-palaces which shall house the works of the poets. We have spent
more millions on universities which shall teach these works. But as
for making it possible for our few real poets to produce works, and
completely fulfill their priceless functions, we have always satisfied
ourselves by decreeing: "Let there be a sound cash basis."

So it came to pass that when the first exuberant, pioneer
energy-margin of our race began to be consumed by the new and abnormal
type of city life, it became no longer possible for the poets to put
as much soul-sinew as theretofore into their lines, after they had
toilfully earned the luxury of trying to be our idealistic leaders.
For often their initial efforts consumed their less than pioneer
vitality. And how did we treat them from the first? In the old days we
set Longfellow and Lowell at one of the most exhausting of
professions--teaching. We made Emerson do one-night lecture-stands all
winter long in the West--sometimes for five dollars a lecture