t in the same thought-wave with dollars and
cents?

But this thousand dollars might do something even better than help
produce counterparts of famous poems created in other times and lands.
It might actually secure the inestimable boon of a year's leisure, a
procession of peaceful vistas, and a brimming cup for one of that "new
brood" of "poets to come" which Walt Whitman so confidently counted
upon to 'justify him and answer what he was for.' This handful of gold
might make it possible for one of these new poets to come into his
own, and ours, at once, and in his own person accomplish that fusion,
so devoutly to be wished, of those diverse factors of the greatest
poetry which have existed among us thus far only in awful
isolation--the possession of this one and that of our chief singers.

How fervently we poetry-lovers wish that one of the captains of
industry would feel impelled to put his hand into his pocket--if only
into his watch-pocket--or adorn his last testament with a modest
codicil! It would be such poetic justice if one of those who have
prospered through the very speeding-up process which has so seriously
crippled our poetry, should devote to its service a small tithe of
what he has won from poetry's loss--and thus hasten our renaissance of
singers, and bring a new dawn, 'brighter than before known,' out of
the dusk of the poets.

IX

THE JOYOUS MISSION OF MECHANICAL MUSIC

I wonder if any other invention has ever, in such a brief time, made
so many joyful hearts as the invention of mechanical music. It has
brought light, peace, gladness, and the gift of self-expression to
every third or fourth flat, villa, and lonely farmhouse in the land.
Its voice has literally gone out through all the earth, and with a
swiftness more like that of light than of sound.

Only yesterday we were marveling at the discovery of the larger
magazine audience. Until then we had never dreamed of addressing
millions of fellow creatures at one time, as the popular magazine now
does. Imagine the astonished delight of Plato or Cervantes, Poe or
Dickens, if they had been given in one week an audience equivalent in
number to five thousand readers a year for ten centuries! Dickens
would have called it, I think, "immortality-while-you-wait." Yet this
sort of immortality was recently placed at the immediate disposal of
the ordinary writer.

The miracle was unique in history. But it did not long remain so. Not
content with