me can never force to
retract his superlative claims for his protege's promise.

More significant is a different note which is sometimes heard. In
Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, it is ostensibly ironic. The critic
muses,

He died--'twas shrewd:
And came with all his youth and unblown hopes
On the world's heart, and touched it into tears.

In _Sordello_, likewise, it is the unappreciative critic who expresses
this sort of pleasure in Eglamor's death. But this feeling has also been
expressed with all seriousness, as in Stephen Phillip's _Keats_:

I have seen more glory in sunrise
Than in the deepening of azure noon,

or in Francis Thompson's _The Cloud's Swan Song_:

I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time,
In predecease of his just-sickening song,
Of him that set, wrapped in his radiant rhyme,
Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long.

Obviously we are in the wake of the Rousseau theory, acclimatized in
English poetry by Wordsworth's youth "who daily farther from the east
must travel." A long array of poets testifies to the doctrine that a
poet's first days are his best. [Footnote: See S. T. Coleridge, _Youth
and Age_; J. G. Percival, _Poetry_; William Cullen Bryant, _I Cannot
Forget with What Fervid Devotion_; Bayard Taylor, _The Return of the
Goddess_; Richard Watson Gilder, _To a Young Poet_, _The Poet's Secret_;
George Henry Boker, _To Bayard Taylor_; Martin Farquhar Tupper, _To a
Young Poet_; William E. Henley, _Something Is Dead_; Francis Thompson,
_From the Night of Foreboding_; Thomas Hardy, _In the Seventies_; Lewis
Morris, _On a Young Poet_; Richard Le Gallienne, _A Face in a Book_;
Richard Middleton, _The Faithful Poet, The Boy Poet_; Don Marquis, _The
Singer_ (1915); John Hall Wheelock, _The Man to his Dead Poet_ (1919);
Cecil Roberts, _The Youth of Beauty_ (1915); J. Thorne Smith, jr., _The
Lost Singer_ (1920); Edna St. Vincent Millay, _To a Poet that Died
Young_.] _Optima dies_ ... _prima fugit_; the note echoes and reechoes
through English poetry. Hear it in Arnold's _Progress of Poetry_:

Youth rambles on life's arid mount,
And strikes the rock and finds the vein,
And brings the water from the fount.
The fount which shall not flow again.

The man mature with labor chops
For the bright stream a channel grand,
And sees not that the sacred drops
Ran off and vanished out of hand.

And then the old man totters nigh
And feebly rakes among t