5. Though few have devoted their entire lives to it, most of our poets have begun the profession betimes, conceiving very often in haste, and publishing in their immaturity. The painful advice of Horace has not been to our liking. With the examples of Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson continually before us, we have yet failed to profit by their insistence upon generous preparation, meticulous technique, and laborious delay in publication. We have realised the brevity of life more fully than the length of art. 6. Our respect for the “practical” and for “common sense” is allied to a fondness shown in our poetry for common, everyday subjects. Here, of course, we have succeeded better in the comic than in the serious vein. To treat of homely topics so as to invest their essential dignity with the light of imagination--in painting the world about us, to “add the gleam”--was the task set for himself by an English mystic. It is a dangerous trade for men whose talk is of oxen. Homely minds on homely matters are prone to slip into the trivial or the pathetic. Even Longfellow cannot be freed from the charge of too much attention to the obvious commonplace, and, as a versifier at least, of too much love for the merely sentimental. For adequate imaginative handling of themes that are serious, complete, and of sufficient magnitude to produce the loftier effects of great literary art, we are in general forced to go to our best prose fiction. 7. So long as Puritan ideals, however modified and softened, continued to dominate any considerable part of American education, that is, up to a point somewhere within the past twenty-five years, our poetry has tended to be obviously didactic. Not only clerical but secular poets have seemed to regard themselves as direct teachers of morality. In satirical writers,--Freneau, Halleck,--or in literature that by virtue of its kind is pietistic, such a tendency is altogether normal and effective. But in supposedly imaginative poems such as “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” though the basic moral order of the universe doubtless ought to be inherent, it just as certainly ought to contrive its own effect, without the adventitious aid of sermonising. To the present writer, much of the best--not of course the very best--in American poetry loses in ethical as well as æsthetic value through the intrusion of argument and exhortation on the subject of conduct or belief. The finest work of Holmes, for instance, “The Chambered Nautilus,” may be thought to lose in this way. The spirit of the United States is a prosaic spirit, hence our verse, when it is at all substantial, rarely lacks some element or other from the style of the forensic orator.