It explains the weakness of the whole school. All too often did these young poets of the second generation write from out their heads rather than their hearts. They were practitioners of the poetic art rather than eager workers in the stuff that is human life. They were inspired not by their times and the actual life that touched elbows with theirs in their toil from day to day; they were inspired by other singers. Poetry they wove from poetry; words from words. Song begotten from other song perishes with its singer. To endure, poetry must come from "that inexpressible aching feeling of the heart"--from the impact of life upon life; it must thrill with the deepest emotions of its creator's soul as he looks beyond his books and all the printed words of others into the yearning, struggling world of men. I The members of this second generation of poets fall into two distinct groups: first, those who caught not at all the new note that came into American life and American literature after the war, and so, like the survivors of the earlier school, went on to the end only echoing and reëchoing the earlier music; and, secondly, those transitional poets who yielded to the change of times and retuned their instruments to the new key. Of the first group four only may be mentioned: Thomas Buchanan Read (1822-1872), George Henry Boker (1823-1890), Bayard Taylor (1825-1878), and Richard Henry Stoddard (1825-1903). None of these may be called a poet of the transition; none of these, not even Taylor, caught the new spirit of recreated America; none of them added to poetry any notes that have influenced the song or the life or the spirit of later years. They were poets of beauty without a message, and they caught no new vision of beauty. The work of the group began early, only a few years later than that of the major singers. Taylor's _Ximena_ appeared in 1844; Boker's _Lesson of Life_ and Read's _Poems_ in 1847; and Stoddard's _Footprints_ in 1849. By 1870 they had settled into their final manner. It was theirs to strike the last notes, ineffective and all too often decadent, of that mid-century music that had begun with Bryant and Poe, with Emerson and Whittier, with Willis and Longfellow. II We may pause a moment with Taylor. His personality in the early seventies undoubtedly was more potent in America than that of any other poet. His was the leading poetic voice of the Centennial of 1876, that great national gathering that marks in a way the birth of the new American spirit.