and conversely it seems fitting that a _De Senectute_ should come from an Augustan period. As for the attitude toward age of our own day,--the detestation of age expressed by Alan Seeger [Footnote: See _There Was a Youth Around Whose Early Way_.] and Rupert Brooke, [Footnote: See _The Funeral of Youth: Threnody_.]--the complaint of Francis Ledwidge, at twenty-six, that years are robbing him of his inspiration, [Footnote: See _Growing Old, Youth_.]--that, to their future readers, will only mean that they lived in days of much feeling and action, and that they died young. [Footnote: One of the war poets, Joyce Kilmer, was already changing his attitude at thirty. Compare his juvenile verse, "It is not good for poets to grow old," with the later poem, _Old Poets_.] As the world subsides, after its cataclysm, into contemplative revery, it is inevitable that poets will, for a time, once more conceive as their ideal, not a singer aflame with youth and passion, but a poet of rich experience and profound reflection, White-bearded and with eyes that look afar From their still region of perpetual snow, Beyond the little smokes and stirs of men. [Footnote: James Russell Lowell, _Thorwald's Lay_.] CHAPTER III. THE POET AS LOVER Do the _Phaedrus_ and the _Symposium_ leave anything to be said on the relationship of love and poetry? In the last analysis, probably not. The poet, however, is not one to keep silence because of a dearth of new philosophical conceptions. As he discovers, with ever fresh wonder, the power of love as muse, each new poet, in turn, is wont to pour his gratitude for his inspiration into song, undeterred by the fact that love has received many encomiums before. It is not strange that this hymn should be broken by rude taunts on the part of the uninitiated. Saynt Idiote, Lord of these foles alle, Chaucer's Troilus called Love, long ago, and the general public has been no less free with this characterization in the last century than in the fourteenth. Nor is it merely that part of the public which associates all verse with sentimentality, and flees from it as from a contagion, which thus sneers at the praise lovers give to their divinity. On the contrary, certain young aspirants to the poet's laurel, feeling that the singer's indebtedness to love is an overworked theme, have tried, like the non-lover of the _Phaedrus_, to charm the literary public by the novelty of a different profession. As the non-lover of classic Greece was so fluent in his periods that Socrates and Phaedrus narrowly escaped from being overwhelmed by his much speaking, so the non-lover of the present time says much for himself.