wares,
Self-moved, fly to the doors,
Nor sword of angels could reveal
What they conceal.
[Footnote: _Merlin_.]

What is the poet, thus shut out of Paradise, to do? He can only make a
frenzied effort to record his vision before its very memory has faded
from him. Benvenuto Cellini has told us of his tantrums while he was
finishing his bronze statue of Perseus. He worked with such fury, he
declares, that his workmen believed him to be no man, but a devil. But
the poet, no less than the molder of bronze, is under the necessity of
casting his work into shape before the metal cools. And his success is
never complete. Shelley writes, "When composition begins, inspiration is
already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been
communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original
conceptions of the poet." [Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.]

Hence may arise the pet theory of certain modern poets, that a long poem
is an impossibility. Short swallow flights of song only can be wholly
sincere, they say, for their ideal is a poem as literally spontaneous as
Sordello's song of Elys. In proportion as work is labored, it is felt to
be dead.

There is no lack of verse suggesting that extemporaneous composition is
most poetical, [Footnote: See Scott's accounts of his minstrels'
composition. See also, Bayard Taylor, _Ad Amicos_, and _Proem
Dedicatory_; Edward Dowden, _The Singer's Plea_; Richard Gilder,
_How to the Singer Comes the Song_; Joaquin Miller, _Because the
Skies are Blue_; Emerson, _The Poet_; Longfellow, _Envoi_; Robert
Bridges, _A Song of My Heart_.] but is there nothing to be said on the
other side? Let us reread Browning's judgment on the matter:

Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke.
Soil so quick receptive,--not one feather-seed,
Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke
Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed
Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet soul!
Indeed?
Rock's the song soil rather, surface hard and bare:
Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage
Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there:
Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after-age
Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage.
[Footnote: _Epilogue to the Dramatic Idyls_. The same thought is in
the sonnet, "I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap," by James
Russell Lowell, and _Overnight, a Rose_, by Caroline Giltima