More than almost any other civilized nation we have earned Allen Upward's reproach in "The New Word": There are two kinds of human outcasts. Man, in his march upward out of the deep into the light, throws out a vanguard and a rearguard, and both are out of step with the main body. Humanity condemns equally those who are too good for it, and those who are too bad. On its Procrustean bed the stunted members of the race are racked; the giants are cut down. It puts to death with the same ruthless equality the prophet and the atavist. The poet and the drunkard starve side by side.... Literature is the chief ornament of humanity; and perhaps humanity never shows itself uglier than when it stands with the pearl shining on its forehead, and the pearl-maker crushed beneath its heel.... England will always have fifteen thousand a year for some respectable clergyman; she will never have it for Shelley. Yes, but how incomparably better England has treated her poets than America has treated hers! What convenient little plums, as De Quincey somewhat wistfully remarked, were always being found for Wordsworth just at the psychological moment; and they were not withheld, moreover, until he was full of years and honors. Indeed, we owe this poet to the poet-by-proxy of whom Wordsworth wrote, in "The Prelude": "He deemed that my pursuits and labours, lay Apart from all that leads to wealth, or even A necessary maintenance insures Without some hazard to the finer sense." How tenderly the frail bodies of Coleridge and of Francis Thompson were cared for by their appreciators. How potently the Civil List and the laureateship have helped a long, if most uneven, line of England's singers. Over against our solitary ageing Aldrich, how many great English poets like Byron, Keats, the Brownings, Tennyson, and Swinburne have found themselves with small but independent incomes, free to give their whole unembarrassed souls and all that in them was to their art. And all this since the close of the age of patronage! Why have we never had a Wordsworth, or a Browning? For one thing, because this nation of philanthropists has been too thoughtless to found the small fellowship in creative poetry which might have freed a Wordsworth of ours from communion with a cash-book to wander chanting his new-born lines among the dreamy Adirondack lakes or the frowning Sierras; or that might have sought out our Browning in his grocery store and built him a modest retreat among the Thousand Islands. If not too thoughtless to act thus, we have been too timid. We have been too much afraid of encouraging weaklings by mistake. We have been, in fact, more afraid of encouraging a single mediocre poet than of neglecting a score of Shelleys. But we should remember that even if the weak are encouraged with the strong, no harm is done.