There is an obvious, and yet a very stringent, sense in which no good critic could for a moment question that America has produced poets. A poet is a maker, a man or woman who expresses some mood of vital passion in a new manner and with adequate art. Turning to the accepted ranks of English literature, Tickell is a poet on the score of his one great elegy on Addison, and Wolfe, a century later, by his _Burial of Sir John Moore_. Those poems were wholly new and impassioned, and time has no effect upon the fame of their writers. So long as English poetry continues to be studied a little closely, Tickell and Wolfe will be visible as diminutive fixed stars in our poetical firmament. But in a rapid and superficial glance, Wolfe and Tickell disappear. Let the glance be more and more rapid, and only a few planets of the first magnitude are seen. In the age before Elizabeth, Chaucer alone remains; of the Elizabethan galaxy, so glittering and rich, we see at length only Spenser and Shakespeare; then come successive splendours of Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Burns; then a cluster again of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats. Last of all, still too low on the horizon to be definitely measured, Tennyson and Browning. Fifteen names in all, a sum which might be reduced to ten, perhaps, but never to fewer than ten, nor expanded, on the same scale, beyond eighteen or twenty at the outside. These fifteen are the great English poets, the selected glory and pride of five centuries, the consummation of the noblest dynasty of verse which the world has ever seen. What I take to be the problem is, Has America hitherto produced a poet equal to the least of these, raised as high above any possible vacillation of the tide of fashion? What an invidious question! In the first place, I will have nothing to do with the living. They do not enter into our discussion. There was never a time, in my opinion, when America possessed among her citizens so various and so accomplished singers, gifted in so many provinces of song, as in 1888. But the time has not arrived, and long may it delay, when we shall be called upon to discuss the ultimate _status_ of the now living poets of America. From the most aged of them we have not yet, we hope, received "sad autumn's last chrysanthemum." Those who have departed will alone be glanced at in these few words. Death is the great solution of critical continuity, and the bard whom we knew so well, and who died last night, is nearer already to Chaucer than to us. I shall endeavour to state quite candidly what my own poor opinion is with regard to the claim of any dead American to be classed with those fourteen or fifteen English inheritors of unassailed renown.