And then you know I loved FitzGerald. He had one of my best altars. You remember you read _Omar Khayyam_ twice aloud to me--once in the spring (it was the third of April, a sudden hot day, blue and joyous, slipped in to show God had not forgotten us between weeks of hopeless skies and icy winds) and once last September, that afternoon we drifted down the river past the town, away from houses and people and work and lessons, out to where the partridges scuttled across the stubble and all the world was golden. (That was the eleventh of September; I am rather good, you see, at dates.) Well, now I call him Fitz, and laugh at the description of him going about Suffolk lanes in a battered tall hat tied on in windy weather by a handkerchief, and trailing behind him, instead of clouds of glory, a shawl of green and black plaid. It isn't, of course, in any way a bad thing to trail shawls after you on country walks; there is nothing about it or him that shocks or grieves; he is very lovable. But I don't want to laugh. I don't want to call him Fitz. He is one of the gods in my temple, a place from which I rigorously exclude the sense of humor. I don't like gods who are amusing. I cannot worship and laugh simultaneously. I know that laughter is good, and I know that even derision in small quantities is as wholesome as salt; but I like to laugh and deride outside holy places, and not be forced to do it while I am on my knees. Now don't say What on earth does the woman want? because it seems to me so plain. What the woman wants is that present and future poets should wrap themselves sternly in an impenetrable veil of anonymity. They won't, but she can go on praying that they will. They won't, because of the power of the passing moment, because of the pleasantness of praise, of recognition, of personal influence, and, I suppose, but I'm not sure, of money. Do you remember that merry rhymer Prior, how he sang 'Tis long ago Since gods came down incognito? Well, I wish with all my heart they had gone on doing it a little longer. He wasn't, I think, deploring what I deplore, the absence of a sense for the anonymous in gods, of a sense of the dignity of separation, of retirement, of mystery, wherever there is even one spark of the Divine; I think he thought they had all been, and that neither incognito nor in any other form would they appear again. He implied, and so joined himself across the centuries to the Walrus and the Carpenter, that there were no gods to come. Well, he has been dead over a hundred and eighty years, and they have simply flocked since then. I'd like to write the great names on this page, the names of the poets, first and greatest of the gods, to raise it to dignity and confound the ghost of Prior, but I won't out of consideration for you.