hus Richard Watson Gilder
insists that the poet has "manners like other men" and that on
thisaccount the world that is eagerly awaiting the future poet will miss
him. He repeats the world's query:

How shall we know him?
Ye shall know him not,
Till, ended hate and scorn,
To the grave he's borne.
[Footnote: _When the True Poet Comes._]

Whitman, in his defense, goes farther than this, and takes an original
attitude toward his failure to keep step with other men, declaring

Of these states the poet is the equable man,
Not in him but off him things are grotesque, eccentric,
fail of their full returns.
[Footnote: _By Blue Ontario's Shore._]

As for the third method employed by the public in its attacks upon the
poet,--that of making charges against his truthfulness,--the poet
resents this most bitterly of all. Gray, in _The Bard,_ lays the
wholesale slaughter of Scotch poets by Edward I, to their fearless truth
telling. A number of later poets have written pathetic tales showing the
tragic results of the unimaginative public's denial of the poet's
delicate perceptions of truth. [Footnote: See Jean Ingelow, _Gladys
and her Island;_ Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Singer's Hills;_ J. G.
Holland, _Jacob Hurd's Child._]

To the poet's excited imagination, it seems as if all the world regarded
his race as a constantly increasing swarm of flies, and had started in
on a systematic course of extirpation. [Footnote: See G. K. Chesterton,
_More Poets Yet._] As for the professional critic, he becomes an
ogre, conceived of as eating a poet for breakfast every morning. The new
singer is invariably warned by his brothers that he must struggle for
his honor and his very life against his malicious audience. It is
doubtful if we could find a poet of consequence in the whole period who
does not somewhere characterize men of his profession as the martyrs of
beauty. [Footnote: Examples of abstract discussions of this sort are:
Burns, _The Poet's Progress;_ Keats, _Epistle to George Felton Matthew;_
Tennyson, _To ---- After Reading a Life and Letters;_ Longfellow, _The
Poets;_ Thomas Buchanan Read, _The Master Poets;_ Paul Hamilton Hayne,
_Though Dowered with Instincts;_ Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy;_
George Meredith, _Bellerophon;_ S. L. Fairfield, _The Last Song_ (1832);
S. J. Cassells, _A Poet's Reflections_ (1851); Richard Gilder, _The New
Poet;_ Richard Realf, _Advice Gratis_ (1898); James Whitcomb Riley, _A