own real solicitude should be, not lest the genius have too little adversity to contend with, but lest he have too much. We have heard not a little about the conservation of land, ore, wood, and water. The poetry problem concerns itself with an older sort of conservation about which we heard much even as youngsters in college. I mean the conservation of energy. Our poetry will never emerge from the dusk until either the bodies of our city-prisoned poets manage to overtake the speeding-up process and readjust themselves to it--or until we allow them an opportunity to return for an appreciable part of every year to the country--the place where the poet belongs. It is true that the masters of the other arts have not fared any too well at our hands; but they do not need help as badly by far as the poets need it. What with commissions and sales, scholarships, fellowships, and substantial prizes, the painters and sculptors and architects and even the musicians have, broadly speaking, been able to learn and practise their art in that peace and security which is well-nigh essential to all artistic apprenticeship and productive mastery. They have usually been able to spend more of the year in the country than the poet. And even when bound as fast as he to the city, they have not been forced to choose between burning the candle at both ends or abandoning their art. But for some recondite reason--perhaps because this art cannot be taught at all--it has always been an accepted American conviction that poetry is a thing which may be thrown off at any time as a side issue by highly organized persons, most of whose time and strength and faculties are engaged in a vigorous and engrossing hand-to-hand bout with the wolf on the threshold--a most practical, philistine wolf, moreover, which never heard of rhyme or rhythm, and whose whole acquaintance with prosody is confined to a certain greedy familiarity with frayed masculine and feminine endings. As a result of this common conviction our poets have almost invariably been obliged to make their art a quite subsidiary and haphazard affair, like the rearing of children by a mother who is forced to go out and scrub from early morning till late at night and has to leave little Johnnie tied in his high chair to be fed by an older sister on crusts dabbled in the pot of cold coffee. No wonder that so much of our verse "jest growed," like Topsy. And the resulting state of things has but served to reinforce our belief that to make the race of poets spend their days in correcting encyclopaedia proof, or clerking, or running, notebook in hand, to fires--inheres in the eternal fitness of things.