It may indicate a certain weakness in this hard and fast rule that considerable difficulty is encountered in working it backward. The highest virtue does not always entail a supreme poetic gift, though poets and their friends have sometimes implied as much. Southey, in his critical writings, is likely to confuse his own virtue and that of his protege, Kirke White, with poetical excellence. Longfellow's, Whittier's, Bryant's strength of character has frequently been represented by patriotic American critics as guaranteeing the quality of their poetical wares. Since a claim for the insunderability of virtue and genius seems to lead one to unfortunate conclusions, it has been rashly conceded in certain quarters that the virtue of a great poet may have no immediate connection with his poetic gift. It is conceived by a few nervously moral poets that morality and art dwell in separate spheres, and that the first transcends the second. Tennyson started a fashion for viewing the two excellences as distinct, comparing them, in _In Memoriam_: Loveliness of perfect deeds, More strong than all poetic thought, and his disciples have continued to speak in this strain. This is the tenor, for instance, of Jean Ingelow's _Letters of Life and Morning_, in which she exhorts the young poet, Learn to sing, But first in all thy learning, learn to be. The puritan element in American literary circles, always troubling the conscience of a would-be poet, makes him eager to protest that virtue, not poetry, holds his first allegiance. He held his manly name Far dearer than the muse, [Footnote: J. G. Saxe, _A Poet's Elegy_.] we are told of one poet-hero. The good Catholic verse of Father Ryan carries a warning of the merely fortuitous connection between poets' talent and their respectability, averring, They are like angels, but some angels fell. [Footnote: _Poets_.] Even Whittier is not sure that poetical excellence is worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as virtue, and he writes, Dimmed and dwarfed, in times like these The poet seems beside the man; His life is now his noblest strain. [Footnote: _To Bryant on His Birthday_.]