thout pettifogging qualms. The parallel
lines of our eager pages meet at Infinity--that is, in the infinite
understanding and judgment of the Perfect Reader.

The enjoyment of literature is a personal communion; it cannot be
outwardly instilled. The utmost the critic can do is read the
marriage service over the reader and the book. The union is
consummated, if at all, in secret. But now and then there comes up
the aisle a new Perfect Reader, and all the ghosts of literature
wait for him, starry-eyed, by the altar. And as long as there are
Perfect Readers, who read with passion, with glory, and then speed
to tell their friends, there will always be, ever and anon, a
Perfect Writer.

And so, dear Perfect Reader, a Merry Christmas to you and a New Year
of books worthy your devotion! When you revive from that book that
holds you in spell, and find this little note on the cold hearth, I
hope you may be pleased.

[Illustration]

THE AUTOGENESIS OF A POET

The mind trudges patiently behind the senses. Day by day a thousand
oddities and charms outline themselves tenderly upon consciousness,
but it may be long before understanding comes with brush and colour
to fill in the tracery. One learns nothing until he rediscovers it
for himself. Every now and then, in reading, I have come across
something which has given me the wild surmise of pioneering mingled
with the faint magic of familiarity--for instance, some of the
famous dicta of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley about poetry. I
realized, then, that a teacher had told me these things in my
freshman year at college--fifteen years ago. I jotted them down at
that time, but they were mere catchwords. It had taken me fifteen
years of vigorous living to overhaul those catchwords and fill them
with a meaning of my own. The two teachers who first gave me some
suspicion of what lies in the kingdom of poetry--who gave "so sweet
a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter into
it"--are both dead. May I mention their names?--Francis B. Gummere
and Albert Elmer Hancock, both of Haverford College. I cannot thank
them as, now, I would like to. For I am (I think) approaching a
stage where I can somewhat understand and relish the things of which
they spoke. And I wonder afresh at the patience and charity of those
who go on lecturing, unabated in zest, to boys of whom one in ten
may perhaps, fifteen years later, begin to grasp their message.

In so far as an