Had I two loaves of bread--ay, ay! One would I sell and daffodils buy To feed my soul. [Footnote: _Beauty_, Theodore Harding Rand.] What is to be done with such people? Charity officers are continually asking. What relief measure can poets themselves suggest? When they are speaking of older poets, they are apt to offer no constructive criticism, but only denunciation of society. Their general tone is that of Burns' lines _Written Under the Portrait of Ferguson:_ Curse on ungrateful man that can be pleased And yet can starve the author of the pleasure. Occasionally the imaginary poet who appears in their verse is quite as bitter. Alexander Smith's hero protests against being "dungeoned in poverty." One of Richard Gilder's poets warns the public, You need not weep for and sigh for and saint me After you've starved me and driven me dead. Friends, do you hear? What I want is bread. [Footnote: _The Young Poet_.] Through the thin veneer of the fictitious poet in Joaquin Miller's _Ina_, the author himself appears, raving, A poet! a poet forsooth! Fool! hungry fool! Would you know what it means to be a poet? It is to want a friend, to want a home, A country, money,--aye, to want a meal. [Footnote: See also John Savage, _He Writes for Bread_.] But in autobiographical verse, the tone changes, and the poet refuses to pose as a candidate for charity. Rather, he parades an ostentatious horror of filthy lucre, only paralleled by his distaste for food. Mrs. Browning boasts, The Devil himself scarce trusts his patented Gold-making art to any who makes rhymes, But culls his Faustus from philosophers And not from poets. [Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] A poet who can make ends meet is practically convicted of being no true artist. Shakespeare is so solitary an exception to this rule, that his mercenary aspect is a pure absurdity to his comrades, as Edwin Arlington Robinson conceives of them. [Footnote: See _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_.] In the eighteenth century indifference to remuneration was not so marked, and in poetic epistles, forgers of the couplet sometimes concerned themselves over the returns, [Footnote: See _Advice to Mr. Pope_, John Hughes; _Economy, The Poet and the Dun_, Shenstone.] but since the romantic movement began, such thought has been held unworthy. [Footnote: See _To a Poet Abandoning His Art_, Barry Cornwall; and _Poets and Poets_, T. E. Browne. On the other hand, see Sebastian Evans, _Religio Poetae_.] In fact, even in these days, we are comparatively safe from a poet's strike. Usually the poet declares that as for himself, he is indifferent to his financial condition. Praed speaks fairly for his brethren, when in _A Ballad Teaching How Poetry Is Best Paid For_, he represents their terms as very easy to meet. Even the melancholy Bowles takes on this subject, for once, a cheerful attitude, telling his visionary boy,