You will provide it that your young poet, your young worshiper, come elsewhere to receive a judgment than to the money-making publisher, and to the staring, vulgar crowd. You will provide it that he does not measure his voice against the big-drum thumping of the best-selling pomposities of the hour. You will provide it that he come, with all honor and all dignity, to the best and truest men that you can engage for the service; and that he come to be judged by one standard, and that not the standard of sales. Whether it be true, whether it be noble, whether it be sincere; whether it show imagination, whether it have melody, beauty, love, aspiration, knowledge; whether, in short, in those forms or in any other forms, it have _power_! Whether the man who wrote it is a man worth training, whether he will repay society for its trust, whether he will bring new beauty into the world!--And then, if these things be true, so long as he works, and grows, and proves his value, so long shall he have the pittance that he needs until he be the master of his voice. Yes, you never thought of that before! I read everything--everywhere--and I never heard it before. And what does that tell about the poverty and blindness and stupidity of this world? Are we not rich enough? Are we not the richest nation in the world? Have we not railroads and houses, food and clothing and bank-stocks enough to make the brain reel? And do we not call ourselves a Christian land? And worship as divine the Teacher who said that “man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”? * * * * * Oh, you world! * * * * * And what would it do? What would it mean? I will tell you a few things that it would mean. First of all it would mean that the man who felt in him the voice of God would know that there was a road he could travel, would know that there was a home for him. He would no longer face the fearful alternative of mediocrity or starvation. He would no longer be tempted, he would no longer be forced to turn from his faith, and stunt his development, and wreck his plans, by base attempts to compromise between his highest and what the world will pay for. Can you have any idea what that would mean to an artist? You say that you love art! Can you have any idea of the effect which that would have upon art? Upon the art of your country--upon American literature! To have a band of perhaps a hundred--perhaps a thousand, proved and chosen--the best and strongest that could be found--and set free and consecrated to the search for beauty! Try it for fifty years--try it for ten years--try the method of raising your poets in your gardens instead of flinging them into your weed-beds--and see what the result would be! See if in fifty years American literature would not have done more than all the rest of the world! * * * * *