No smooth array of phrase, Artfully sought and ordered though it be, Which the cold rhymer lays Upon his page languid industry Can wake the listless pulse to livelier speed. * * * * * The secret wouldst thou know To touch the heart or fire the blood at will? Let thine own eyes o'erflow; Let thy lips quiver with the passionate thrill. Seize the great thought, ere yet its power be past, And bind, in words, the fleet emotion fast. Coleridge's comprehension of this fact led him to cry, "Love is the vital air of my genius." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1799.] All this, considering the usual subject-matter of poetry, is perhaps only saying that the poet must be sincere. The mathematician is most sincere when he uses his intellect exclusively, but a reasoned portrayal of passion is bound to falsify, for it leads one insensibly either to understate, or to burlesque, or to indulge in a psychopathic analysis of emotion. [Footnote: Of the latter type of poetry a good example is Edgar Lee Masters' _Monsieur D---- and the Psycho-Analyst_.] Accordingly, our poets have not been slow to remind us of their passionate temperaments. Landor, perhaps, may oblige us to dip into his biography in order to verify our thesis that the poet is invariably passionate, but in many cases this state of things is reversed, the poet being wont to assure us that the conventional incidents of his life afford no gauge of the ardors within his soul. Thus Wordsworth solemnly assures us, Had I been a writer of love poetry, it would have been natural to me to write with a degree of warmth which could hardly have been approved by my principles, and which might have been undesirable for the reader. [Footnote: See Arthur Symons, _The Romantic Movement_, p. 92 (from Myers, _Life of Wordsworth_).] Such boasting is equally characteristic of our staid American poets, who shrink from the imputation that their orderly lives are the result of temperamental incapacity for unrestraint. [Footnote: Thus Whittier, in _My Namesake_, says of himself, Few guessed beneath his aspect grave What passions strove in chains. Also Bayard Taylor retorts to those who taunt him with lack of passion, But you are blind, and to the blind The touch of ice and fire is one. The same defense is made by Richard W. Gilder in lines entitled _Our Elder Poets_.] In differing mode, Swinburne's poetry is perhaps an expression of the same attitude. The ultra-erotic verse of that poet somehow suggests a wild hullabaloo raised to divert our attention from the fact that he was constitutionally incapable of experiencing passion. Early in the century, something approaching the Wordsworthian doctrine of emotion recollected in tranquillity was in vogue, as regards capacity for passion. The Byronic hero is one whose affections have burned themselves out, and who employs the last worthless years of his life writing them up. Childe Harold is