Hastening to give credit where it is due, let me remind the readers of THE LITTLE REVIEW that this is the last line of a poem by Maxwell Bodenheim in the last number of that periodical. I trust that Mr. Bodenheim will forgive me for using him to point a moral and adorn a critical article, especially as I shall have to compare him with Wordsworth before I get through, and shall have to ask him whether he is not carrying the Wordsworthian tradition just a little too far into the region of the individual and subjective, into the unknown territory of the most isolated thing in the world: the human mind in those regions of it which have not been socially disciplined into the categories which make communication possible between mind and mind. The other voice which I have mentioned is that of Professor S. B. Gass, of the University of Nebraska, who writes on Literature as a Fine Art in _The Mid-West Quarterly_ for July. Professor Gass takes the very sane position that words are the socially-created tools—arbitrary symbols, he calls them—to give us “not the thing itself, but something about the thing—some relationship, some classification, some generalization, some cause, some effect, some attribute, something that goes on wholly in the mind and is not sensuously present in the thing itself.” And that work, he continues, is thought, and it proceeds by statement. But undoubtedly words have sensuous sounds and sensuous denotations and connotations. Professor Gass admits this, but regards their sensuous properties—and especially, I imagine he would insist, their sensuous sounds based on physiological accident—as secondary. Hence, to him, Imagism would be a use of words for purely secondary results. And that is decadence: “Decadence arises out of the primary pursuit of secondary functions.” Now Wordsworth and the romantic school generally used words in this way, and so, logically enough, Professor Gass classifies Wordsworth as a decadent. In doing so we fear he exhibits an intellect too prone to dichotomize. He cuts human psychology up into too many and too water-tight compartments. When he quotes Wordsworth’s ... I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. he seems to forget that there is more in that poem than its imagism—as we would call it now; that it is record of a personal experience, that is not only a trespass on the domain of the painter (to speak as if we agreed with our critic) but that it is a personal reaction to the picture painted in those words, that it tells us something that no mere picture could do. The poem, in fact, is a picture plus a story of the effect of the picture upon a human soul.