The award of such a fellowship must not, of course, involve the least hint of charity or coercion. It should be offered and accepted as an honor, not as a donation. The yearly income should, in my opinion, be small. It should be such a sum as would almost, but not quite, support the incumbent very simply in the country, and still allow for books and an occasional trip to town. In some cases an income of a thousand dollars, supplemented by the little that poetry earns and possibly by a random article or story in the magazines, would enable a poet to lead a life of the largest effectiveness. It is my belief that almost any genuine poet who is now kept in the whirl by economic reasons and thus debarred from the free practice of his calling would gladly relinquish even a large salary and reduce his life to simple terms to gain the inestimable privilege of devoting himself wholly to his art before the golden bowl is broken. Many of those who are in intimate touch with the poets of America to-day could show any philanthropist how to do his land and the world more actual, visible, immediate good by devoting a thousand dollars to poetry, than by allowing an hundred times that sum to slip into the ordinary well-worn grooves of philanthropy. Some years ago a _questionnaire_ was submitted to various literary men by a poetry-lover who hoped to induce a wealthy friend to subsidize poets of promise in case these literary leaders approved the plan. While the younger writers warmly favored the idea, a few of the older ones discouraged it. These were, in all cases, men who had made a financial success in more lucrative branches of literature than poetry; and it was natural for the veterans, who had brawnily struggled through the burden and heat of the day, to look with the unsympathetic eye of the sturdy upon those frailer ones of the rising generation who perhaps might, without assistance, be eliminated in the rough-and-tumble of the literary market-place. Of course it was but human for the veterans to insist that any real genius among their youthful competitors "would out," and that any assistance would but make life too soft for the youngsters, and go to swell the growing "menace" of bad verse by mitigating the primal rigors of natural selection. No doubt the generation of writers older than Wordsworth quite innocently uttered these very same sentiments in voices of deep authority when it was proposed to offer this young person a chance to compose in peace. No. One fears that the attitude of these veterans was not wholly judicial. But then, why should any haphazard group of creative artists be expected to be judicial, anyway? One might as reasonably go to the Louvre for classes in conic sections, or to the Garden of the Gods for instruction in Rabbinical theology.