But though passion is so often the source of his inspiration, the poet's love affairs are seldom allowed to flourish. The only alleviation of his loneliness must be, then, in the friendship of unusually gifted and discerning men, usually of his own calling. Doubtless the ideal of most nineteenth century writers would be such a jolly fraternity of poets as Herrick has made immortal by his _Lines to Ben Jonson_.[Footnote: The tradition of the lonely poet was in existence even at this time, however. See Ben Jonson, _Essay on Donne_.] A good deal of nineteenth century verse shows the author enviously dwelling upon the ideal comradeship of Elizabethan poets.[Footnote: Keats' _Lines on the Mermaid Tavern_, Browning's _At the Mermaid_, Watts-Dunton's _Christmas at the Mermaid_, E. A. Robinson's _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_, Josephine Preston Peabody's _Marlowe_, and Alfred Noyes' _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_ all present fondly imagined accounts of the gay intimacy of the master dramatists. Keats, who was so generous in acknowledging his indebtedness to contemporary artists, tells, in his epistles, of the envy he feels for men who created under these ideal conditions of comradeship.] But multiple friendships did not flourish among poets of the last century,--at least they were overhung by no glamor of romance that lured the poet to immortalize them in verse. The closest approximation to such a thing is in the redundant complimentary verse, with which the New England poets showered each other to such an extent as to arouse Lowell's protest. [Footnote: See _A Fable for Critics_.] Even they, however, did not represent themselves as living in Bohemian intimacy. Possibly the temperamental jealousy that the philistine world ascribes to the artist, causing him to feel that he is the one elect soul sent to a benighted age, while his brother-artists are akin to the money-changers in the temple, hinders him from unreserved enjoyment even of his fellows' society. Tennyson's and Swinburne's outbreaks against contemporary writers appear to be based on some such assumption. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _The New Timon and the Poet_; Bulwer Lytton, _The New Timon_; Swinburne, _Essay on Whitman_. For more recent manifestation of the same attitude see John Drinkwater, _To Alice Meynell_ (1911); Shaemas O'Sheel, _The Poets with the Sounding Gong_ (1912); Robert Graves, _The Voice of Beauty Drowned_ (1920).] Consequently the poet is likely to celebrate one or two deep friendships in an otherwise lonely life. A few instances of such friendships are so notable, that the reader is likely to overlook their rarity. Such were the friendships of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, also that recorded in Landor's shaken lines: Friends! hear the words my wandering thoughts would say, And cast them into shape some other day; Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone, And shattered with the fall, I stand alone.