alling. Doubtless the ideal of most
nineteenth century writers would be such a jolly fraternity of poets as
Herrick has made immortal by his _Lines to Ben Jonson_.[Footnote:
The tradition of the lonely poet was in existence even at this time,
however. See Ben Jonson, _Essay on Donne_.] A good deal of nineteenth
century verse shows the author enviously dwelling upon the ideal
comradeship of Elizabethan poets.[Footnote: Keats' _Lines on the
Mermaid Tavern_, Browning's _At the Mermaid_, Watts-Dunton's _Christmas
at the Mermaid_, E. A. Robinson's _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from
Stratford_, Josephine Preston Peabody's _Marlowe_, and Alfred Noyes'
_Tales of the Mermaid Inn_ all present fondly imagined accounts of the
gay intimacy of the master dramatists. Keats, who was so generous in
acknowledging his indebtedness to contemporary artists, tells, in his
epistles, of the envy he feels for men who created under these ideal
conditions of comradeship.] But multiple friendships did not flourish
among poets of the last century,--at least they were overhung by no
glamor of romance that lured the poet to immortalize them in verse. The
closest approximation to such a thing is in the redundant complimentary
verse, with which the New England poets showered each other to such an
extent as to arouse Lowell's protest. [Footnote: See _A Fable for
Critics_.] Even they, however, did not represent themselves as living in
Bohemian intimacy. Possibly the temperamental jealousy that the
philistine world ascribes to the artist, causing him to feel that he is
the one elect soul sent to a benighted age, while his brother-artists
are akin to the money-changers in the temple, hinders him from
unreserved enjoyment even of his fellows' society. Tennyson's and
Swinburne's outbreaks against contemporary writers appear to be based on
some such assumption. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _The New Timon and the
Poet_; Bulwer Lytton, _The New Timon_; Swinburne, _Essay on Whitman_.
For more recent manifestation of the same attitude see John Drinkwater,
_To Alice Meynell_ (1911); Shaemas O'Sheel, _The Poets with the Sounding
Gong_ (1912); Robert Graves, _The Voice of Beauty Drowned_ (1920).]

Consequently the poet is likely to celebrate one or two deep friendships
in an otherwise lonely life. A few instances of such friendships are so
notable, that the reader is likely to overlook their rarity. Such were
the friendships of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of Wordsworth