In your eye there is death; There is frost in your breath Which would blight the plants. * * * * * In the heart of the garden the merry bird chants; It would fall to the ground if you came in. But it is not fair always to lay the shattering of the poet's dream to an intruder. The poet himself cannot account for its departure, so delicate and evanescent is it. Emerson says, There are open hours When the God's will sallies free, And the dull idiot might see The flowing fortunes of a thousand years;-- Sudden, at unawares, Self-moved, fly to the doors, Nor sword of angels could reveal What they conceal. [Footnote: _Merlin_.] What is the poet, thus shut out of Paradise, to do? He can only make a frenzied effort to record his vision before its very memory has faded from him. Benvenuto Cellini has told us of his tantrums while he was finishing his bronze statue of Perseus. He worked with such fury, he declares, that his workmen believed him to be no man, but a devil. But the poet, no less than the molder of bronze, is under the necessity of casting his work into shape before the metal cools. And his success is never complete. Shelley writes, "When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet." [Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.] Hence may arise the pet theory of certain modern poets, that a long poem is an impossibility. Short swallow flights of song only can be wholly sincere, they say, for their ideal is a poem as literally spontaneous as Sordello's song of Elys. In proportion as work is labored, it is felt to be dead. There is no lack of verse suggesting that extemporaneous composition is most poetical, [Footnote: See Scott's accounts of his minstrels' composition. See also, Bayard Taylor, _Ad Amicos_, and _Proem Dedicatory_; Edward Dowden, _The Singer's Plea_; Richard Gilder, _How to the Singer Comes the Song_; Joaquin Miller, _Because the Skies are Blue_; Emerson, _The Poet_; Longfellow, _Envoi_; Robert Bridges, _A Song of My Heart_.] but is there nothing to be said on the other side? Let us reread Browning's judgment on the matter: