So it came to pass that when the first exuberant, pioneer energy-margin of our race began to be consumed by the new and abnormal type of city life, it became no longer possible for the poets to put as much soul-sinew as theretofore into their lines, after they had toilfully earned the luxury of trying to be our idealistic leaders. For often their initial efforts consumed their less than pioneer vitality. And how did we treat them from the first? In the old days we set Longfellow and Lowell at one of the most exhausting of professions--teaching. We made Emerson do one-night lecture-stands all winter long in the West--sometimes for five dollars a lecture and feed for his horse. We made Bryant ruin a gift as elemental as Wordsworth's, in journalism; Holmes, visit patients at all hours of the day and night; Poe, take to newspaper offices and drink. We made Whitman drive nails, set type and drudge in the Indian Bureau in Washington, from which he was dismissed for writing the most original and the most poetic of American books. Later he was rescued from want only by the humiliation of a public European subscription. Lanier we allowed to waste away in a dingy lawyer's office, then kill himself so fast by teaching and writing railway advertisements and playing the flute in a city orchestra that he was forced to defer composing "Sunrise" until too weak with fever to carry his hand to his lips. And this was eleven years after that brave spirit's single cry of reproach: "Why can we poets dream us beauty, so, But cannot dream us bread?" With Lanier the physical exhaustion incident to the modern speeding-up process began to be more apparent. Edward Rowland Sill we did away with in his early prime through journalism and teaching. We curbed and pinched and stunted the promising art of Richard Watson Gilder by piling upon him several men's editorial work. We created a poetic resemblance between Arthur Upson and the hero of "The Divine Fire" by employing him in a bookstore. We made William Vaughn Moody teach in a city environment utterly hostile to his poetry, and later set the hand that gave us "An Ode in Time of Hesitation" to the building of popular melodrama. These are only a tithe of the things that we have done to the hardiest of those benefactors of ours: "The poets, who on earth have made us heirs Of truth and pure delight." It is not pleasant to dwell on the fate of those less sturdy ones who have remained mute, inglorious Miltons for lack of a little practical appreciation and a small part of a small fresh-air fund. So far as I know, Thomas Bailey Aldrich is the only prominent figure among the poets of our elder generations who was given the means of devoting himself entirely to his art. And even _his_ fortune was not left to him by his practical, poetry-loving friend until so late in the day that his creative powers had already begun to decline through age and over-much magazine editing.