Of these states the poet is the equable man, Not in him but off him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their full returns. [Footnote: _By Blue Ontario's Shore._] As for the third method employed by the public in its attacks upon the poet,--that of making charges against his truthfulness,--the poet resents this most bitterly of all. Gray, in _The Bard,_ lays the wholesale slaughter of Scotch poets by Edward I, to their fearless truth telling. A number of later poets have written pathetic tales showing the tragic results of the unimaginative public's denial of the poet's delicate perceptions of truth. [Footnote: See Jean Ingelow, _Gladys and her Island;_ Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Singer's Hills;_ J. G. Holland, _Jacob Hurd's Child._] To the poet's excited imagination, it seems as if all the world regarded his race as a constantly increasing swarm of flies, and had started in on a systematic course of extirpation. [Footnote: See G. K. Chesterton, _More Poets Yet._] As for the professional critic, he becomes an ogre, conceived of as eating a poet for breakfast every morning. The new singer is invariably warned by his brothers that he must struggle for his honor and his very life against his malicious audience. It is doubtful if we could find a poet of consequence in the whole period who does not somewhere characterize men of his profession as the martyrs of beauty. [Footnote: Examples of abstract discussions of this sort are: Burns, _The Poet's Progress;_ Keats, _Epistle to George Felton Matthew;_ Tennyson, _To ---- After Reading a Life and Letters;_ Longfellow, _The Poets;_ Thomas Buchanan Read, _The Master Poets;_ Paul Hamilton Hayne, _Though Dowered with Instincts;_ Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy;_ George Meredith, _Bellerophon;_ S. L. Fairfield, _The Last Song_ (1832); S. J. Cassells, _A Poet's Reflections_ (1851); Richard Gilder, _The New Poet;_ Richard Realf, _Advice Gratis_ (1898); James Whitcomb Riley, _An Outworn Sappho;_ Paul Laurence Dunbar, _The Poet;_ Theodore Watts-Dunton, _The Octopus of the Golden Isles;_ Francis Ledwidge, _The Coming Poet._] Shelley is particularly wrought up on the subject, and in _The Woodman and the Nightingale_ expresses through an allegory the murderous designs of the public. A salient example of more vicarious indignation is Mrs. Browning, who exposes the world's heartlessness in a poem called _The Seraph and the Poet._ In _A Vision of Poets_ she betrays less indignation, apparently believing that experience of undeserved suffering is essential to the maturing of genius. In this poem the world's greatest poets are described: Where the heart of each should beat, There seemed a wound instead of it, From whence the blood dropped to their feet. The young hero of the poem, to whom the vision is given, naturally shrinks from the thought of such suffering, but the attendant spirit leads him on, nevertheless, to a loathsome pool, where there are bitter waters,