The choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence: live In pulses stirred to generosity, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues. [Footnote: George Eliot, _The Choir Invisible_.] Does this mean simply the immortality of fame? It is a higher thing than that. The beauty which the poet creates is itself creative, and having the principle of life in it, can never perish. Whitman cries, Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not today is to justify me and answer what I am for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known, Arouse! for you must justify me! [Footnote: _Poets to Come_.] Browning made the only apparent trace of Sordello left in the world, the snatch of song which the peasants sing on the hillside. Yet, though his name be lost, the poet's immortality is sure. For like Socrates in the _Symposium_, his desire is not merely for a fleeting vision of beauty, but for birth and generation in beauty. And the beauty which he is enabled to bring into the world will never cease to propagate itself. So, though he be as fragile as a windflower, he may assure himself, I shall not die; I shall not utterly die, For beauty born of beauty--that remains. [Footnote: Madison Cawein, _To a Windflower_.] CHAPTER VIII. A SOBER AFTERTHOUGHT Not even a paper shortage has been potent to give the lie to the author of _Ecclesiastes_, but it has fanned into flame the long smouldering resentment of those who are wearily conscious that of making many books there is no end. No longer is any but the most confirmed writer suffered to spin out volume after volume in complacent ignorance of his readers' state of mind, for these victims of eye-strain and nerves turn upon the newest book, the metaphorical last straw on the camel's load, with the exasperated cry, Why? Why? and again Why? Fortunately for themselves, most of the poets who have taken the poet's character as their theme, indulged their weakness for words before that long-suffering bookworm, the reader, had turned, but one who at the present day drags from cobwebby corners the accusive mass of material on the subject, must seek to justify, not merely the loquacity of its authors, but one's own temerity as well, in forcing it a second time upon the jaded attention of the public.