Yet the realist may find a sort of justification for himself; at least James Thomson, B.V., thinks he has found one for him. The most thoroughly hopeless exposition of the world's meaninglessness, in English poetry, is doubtless Thomson's _City of Dreadful Night_. Why does the author give such a ghastly thing to the world? In order, he says, that some other clear-eyed spectator of the nightmare of existence may gain a forlorn comfort from it, since he will know that a comrade before him has likewise seen things at their blackest and worst. But would Plato accept this as a justification for realistic poetry? It is doubtful. No one could be comforted by a merely literal rendering of life. The comfort must derive from the personal equation, which is the despair engendered in the author by dreams of something better than reality; therefore whatever merit resides in such poetry comes not from its realism, but from the idealism of the writer. We must not think that all poets who regard their poetry as a reflection of this world alone, agree in praising glaring realism as a virtue. Rather, some of them say, the value of their reflection lies in its misty indistinctness. Life may be sordid and ugly at first hand, but let the artist's reflection only be remote enough, and the jagged edges and dissonances of color which mar daily living will be lost in the purple haze of distance. Gazing at such a reflection, men may perhaps forget, for a space, how dreary a thing existence really is. And they shall be accounted poet-kings Who simply tell the most heart-easing things, [Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.] said Keats in his youth. Such a statement of the artist's purpose inevitably calls up William Morris: Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, Why should I strive to set the crooked straight? Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, Telling a tale, not too importunate To those who in the sleepy region stay, Lulled by the singer of an empty day. [Footnote: _Prologue to the Earthly Paradise_.] Would Plato scoff at such a formulation of the artist's mission? He would rather condemn it, as fostering illusion and falsehood in men's minds. But we moderns are perhaps more world-weary, less sanguine about ideal truth than the ancients. With one of our war poets, we often plead for "song that turneth toil to rest," [Footnote: Madison Cawein, _Preludes_.] and agree with Keats that, whether art has any other justification or not, it has one "great end, to soothe the cares of man." [Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.] We are not to imagine that many of our poets are content with the idea that poetry has so minor a function as this. They play with the thought of life's possible insignificance and leave it, for idealism is the breath of life to poets, and their adherence to realism amounts to suicide. Poetry may be comforting without being illusive. Emerson says,