"Said John, 'Fight on, my merry men all. I am a little hurt, but I am not slain; I will lay me down for to bleed a while, And then I'll rise and fight with you again.'" Yes, but what of the weaker brothers and sisters in art who have not yet succeeded--perhaps for want of these very qualities? I believe that a newly developed spirit of sportsmanship, acting upon a newly developed body, will presently bring to many a disheartened struggler just that increment of resilient gameness which will mean success instead of failure. Thus, while our artists show a tendency to hark back to the Greek physical ideal, they are not harking backward but forward when they yield to the mental and spiritual influences of sportsmanship. For this spirit was unknown to the ancient world. Until yesterday art and sportsmanship never met. But now that they are mating I am confident that there will come of this union sons and daughters who shall joyfully obey the summons that is still ringing down to us over the heads of the anaemic contemporaries of the exuberant old sportsman, Walt Whitman: "Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known, Arouse! for you must justify me." VII PRINTED JOY _The old joy which makes us more debtors to poetry than anything else in life._ RALPH WALDO EMERSON. America is trying to emerge from the awkward age. Its body is full-grown. Its spirit is still crude with a juvenile crudity. What does this spirit need? Next to contact with true religion, it most needs contact with true poetry. It needs to absorb the grace, the wisdom, the idealistic beauty of the art, and thrill in rhyme with poetry's profound, spiritual insights. The promising thing is that America is beginning to do exactly this to-day. The entire history of our enjoyment of poetry might be summed up in that curious symbol which appears over the letter _n_ in the word "canon." A rise, a fall, a rise. Here is the whole story of the American poetry-lover. His enthusiasm first reached a high point about the middle of the nineteenth century. A generation later it fell into a swift decline. But three or four years ago it began to revive so rapidly that a poetry-lover's renaissance is now a reality. This renaissance has not yet been explained, although the majority of readers and writers feel able to tell why poetry declined. Let us glance at a few of the more popular explanations.