duct he sets for himself. This sin
consists of pressing his sweetheart's hand in the dance, and after
shamefacedly confessing it, he adds,

And ere I slept, on bended knee
I owned myself, with many a tear
Unseasonable, disorderly.

But so distasteful, to the average poet, is such cringing subservience
to philistine standards, that he takes delight in swinging to the other
extreme, and representing the innocent poet's persecutions at the hands
of an unfriendly world. He insists that in venturing away from
conventional standards poets merit every consideration, being

Tall galleons,
Out of their very beauty driven to dare
The uncompassed sea, founder in starless night.
[Footnote: _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_, Alfred Noyes.]

He is convinced that the public, far from sympathizing with such
courage, deliberately tries to drive the poet to desperation. Josephine
Preston Peabody makes Marlowe inveigh against the public,

My sins they learn by rote,
And never miss one; no, no miser of them,
* * * * *
Avid of foulness, so they hound me out
Away from blessing that they prate about,
But never saw, and never dreamed upon,
And know not how to long for with desire.
[Footnote: _Marlowe_.]

In the same spirit Richard Le Gallienne, in lines _On the Morals of
Poets_, warns their detractor,

Bigot, one folly of the man you flout
Is more to God than thy lean life is whole.

If it be true that the poet occasionally commits an error, he points out
that it is the result of the philistine's corruption, not his own. He
acknowledges that it is fatally easy to lead him, not astray perhaps,
but into gravely compromising himself, because he is characterized by a
childlike inability to comprehend the very existence of sin in the
world. Of course his environment has a good deal to do with this. The
innocent shepherd poet, shut off from crime by many a grassy hill and
purling stream, has a long tradition behind him. The most typical
pastoral poet of our period, the hero of Beattie's _The Minstrel_,
suffers a rude shock when an old hermit reveals to him that all the
world is not as fair and good as his immediate environment. The
innocence of Wordsworth, and of the young Sordello, were fostered by
like circumstances. Arnold conceives of Clough in this way, isolating
him in Oxford instead of Arcadia, and represents him as dying from the
shock of awakening to condit