ent. The creative and the critical faculties
are usually as distinct and as mutually exclusive spheres as that of
the impassioned, partisan lawyer and the cool, impartial judge.

To whom, then, should the decision be left? It should, in my opinion,
be left to a real _judge_--to some broad, keen critic of poetry with a
clear, unbiased contemporary view of the whole domain of the art. It
matters not whether he is professional or amateur, so he is untouched
by academicism and has not done so much reading or writing as to
impair his mental digestion and his clarity of vision. Care, of
course, would have to be used in safeguarding the critic-judge against
undue pressure in favor of this candidate or that; and in safeguarding
the incumbent of the fellowship from yet more insidious influences.
For the apparently liberated poet would merely have exchanged prisons
if he learned that the founder of the fellowship wished to dictate
what sort of poetry he should write.

The idea of poetry fellowships is not as novel as it perhaps may
sound. It is no mere empirical theory. Americans ought to be proud to
know that, in a modest way, it has recently been tried here, and is
proving a success. I am told that already two masters of poetry have
been presented to us as free workers in their art by two Boston
philanthropists, and have been enabled to accomplish some of their
best work through such fellowships as are here advocated. This fact
should put cities like New York, Pittsburg, and Chicago on their
mettle. For they must realize that Boston, with her quiet,
slow-moving, Old-World pace, has not done to poetry a tithe of the
harm that her more energetic neighbors have, and should therefore not
be suffered to bear the entire brunt of the expiation.

Men say that money cannot buy a joyful heart. But next to writing a
great poem, I can scarcely imagine a greater happiness than to know
that a thousand of my dollars had enabled an imprisoned genius to
shake from his shoes the dust of a city office and go for a year to
"God's outdoors," there to free his system of some of the beauty that
had chokingly accumulated there until it had grown an almost
intolerable pain. What joy to know that my fellowship had given men
the modern New World "Hyperion," or "Prelude," or "Ring and the Book"!
And even if that whole year resulted in nothing more than a "Skylark,"
or a "Rabbi Ben Ezra," or a "Crossing the Bar"--could one possibly
consider such a resul