Would that one of those excellent philanthropists who has grown so accustomed to giving a million to libraries and universities that the act has become slightly mechanical--might realize that he has, with all his generosity, made no provision as yet for helping one of the most indispensable of all educational institutions--the poet. Would that he might realize how little good the poet of genius can derive from the universities--places whose conservative formalism is even dangerous to his originality, because they try to melt him along with all the other students and pour him into their one mold. It is distressing to think of all the sums now devoted to inducing callow, overdriven sophomores to compose forced essays and doggerel, by luring them on with the glitter of cash prizes. One shudders to think of all the fellowship money which is now being used to finance reluctant young dry-as-dusts while they are preparing to pack still tighter the already overcrowded ranks of "professors of English literature"--whose profession, as Gerald Stanley Lee justly remarks, is founded on the striking principle that a very great book can be taught by a very little man. This is a department of human effort which, as now usually conducted, succeeds in destroying much budding appreciation of poetry. Why endow these would-be interpreters of poetry, to the neglect of the class of artists whose work they profess to interpret? What should we think of England if her Victorian poets had all happened to be penniless, and she had packed them off to Grub Street and invested, instead, in a few more professors of Victorian literature? Why should not a few thousands out of the millions we spend on education be used to found fellowships of creative poetry? These would not be given at first to those who wish to learn to write poetry; for the first thousands would be far too precious for use in any such wild-cat speculations. They would be devoted, rather, to poets of proved quality, who have already, somehow, learned their art, and who ask no more wondrous boon from life than fresh air and time to regain and keep that necessary margin of vitality which must go to the making of genuine poetry. I would not have the incumbent of such a fellowship, however, deprived suddenly of all outer incentives for effort. The abrupt transition from constant worry and war among his members to an absolutely unclouded life of pure vocation-following might be almost too violent a shock, and unsettle him and injure his productivity for a time.