to the call of the luring creative ideas that constantly beset him. Then, after yielding, he chafes again, and more bitterly, at his faint, imperfect expression of these dreams, recognizing in despair that he has been creating a mere crude by-product of the strenuous life about him. So he burns the torch of life at both ends, and the superhuman speed of modern existence eats it through in the middle. Then suddenly the light fails altogether. Those poets alone who have unusual physical endurance are able to do even a small amount of steady, fine-grained work in the city. The rest are as effectually debarred from it as factory children are debarred from learning the violin well at the fag end of their days of toil. In her autobiography Miss Jane Addams speaks some luminous words about the state of society which forces finely organized artistic talent into the wearing struggle for mere existence. She refers to it as "one of the haunting problems of life; why do we permit the waste of this most precious human faculty, this consummate possession of all civilization? When we fail to provide the vessel in which it may be treasured, it runs out upon the ground and is irretrievably lost." I wonder if we have ever stopped to ask ourselves why so many of our more recent poets have died young. Was it the hand of God, or the effort to do the work of two in a hostile environment, that struck down before their prime such spirits as Sidney Lanier, Edward Rowland Sill, Frederic Lawrence Knowles, Arthur Upson, Richard Hovey, William Vaughn Moody, and the like? These were poets whom we bound to the strenuous city, or at least to hack-work which sapped over-much of their vitality. An old popular fallacy keeps insisting that genius "will out." This is true, but only in a sadder sense than the stupidly proverbial one. As a matter of fact, the light of genius is all too easily blown out and trampled out by a blind and deaf world. But we of America are loath to admit this. And if we do not think of genius as an unquenchable flame, we are apt to think of it as an amazingly hardy plant, more tough than horse-brier or cactus. Only a few of us have yet begun to realize that the flower of genius is not the flower of an indestructible weed, but of a fastidious exotic, which usually demands good conditions for bare existence, and needs a really excellent environment and constant tending if it is to thrive and produce the finest possible blooms. Mankind has usually shown enormous solicitude lest the man of genius be insufficiently supplied with that trouble and sorrow which is supposed to be quite indispensable to his best work. But here and there the thinkers are beginning to realize that the irritable, impulsive, impractical nature of the genius, in even the most favorable environment, is formed for trouble "as the sparks to fly upward." They see that fortune has slain its hundreds of geniuses, but trouble its ten thousands. And they conclude that their