like a general who rushes into
the thick of the fight and dies beside a private. We reverence such a
man, but we realize that it was not his death, but his plan for the
engagement, that saved the day.

If such is the poet's conception of his service to mankind, what is his
reward? The government of society, he returns. Emerson says,

The gods talk in the breath of the woods,
They talk in the shaken pine,
And fill the long reach of the old seashore
With dialogue divine.
And the poet who overhears
Some random word they say
Is the fated man of men
Whom the nations must obey.
[Footnote: Fragment on _The Poet_.]

What is the poet's reward? Immortality. He is confident that if his
vision is true he shall join

The choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man's search
To vaster issues.
[Footnote: George Eliot, _The Choir Invisible_.]

Does this mean simply the immortality of fame? It is a higher thing than
that. The beauty which the poet creates is itself creative, and having
the principle of life in it, can never perish. Whitman cries,

Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not today is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental,
greater than before known,
Arouse! for you must justify me!
[Footnote: _Poets to Come_.]

Browning made the only apparent trace of Sordello left in the world, the
snatch of song which the peasants sing on the hillside. Yet, though his
name be lost, the poet's immortality is sure. For like Socrates in the
_Symposium_, his desire is not merely for a fleeting vision of
beauty, but for birth and generation in beauty. And the beauty which he
is enabled to bring into the world will never cease to propagate itself.
So, though he be as fragile as a windflower, he may assure himself,

I shall not die; I shall not utterly die,
For beauty born of beauty--that remains.
[Footnote: Madison Cawein, _To a Windflower_.]

CHAPTER VIII.

A SOBER AFTERTHOUGHT

Not even a paper shortage has been potent to give the lie to the author
of _Ecclesiastes_, but it has fanned into flame the long smouldering
resentment of those who are wearily conscious that of making many books
th