One will hardly deny that this is sound doctrine, as are the stanzas necessarily omitted, which trace the qualifications of the bard of to-day. Assuredly one touches the question of questions when he seeks the cause for the apparent waning of poetic inspiration in our own time. There is certainly no wane in the diffusion of the poetic impulse; but the poet who is answering the great questions of the age, speaking the indicative words of the future,—to quote Mr. Knowles, A voice whose sagas shall live with God When the lyres of earth are rust,— is hardly being heard at the present hour. There are voices and voices which proclaim truths, but the voice that enunciates Truth in its larger utterance—as it is spoken, for example, in the words of Browning—seems not to find expression in our day. From this the impression has come to prevail that Art is choking virility of utterance, and that a wholly new order of song must grow from newer needs,—song that shall express our national masculinity, our robust democracy, our enlarged patriotism, and our sometimes bumptious Americanism; that labor must have its definite poet, and the “hymn to the workman’s God” contain some different note from that hitherto chanted. To put it in Mr. Knowles’ stirring words from another poem: In the ink of our sweat we will find it yet, The song that is fit for men! And the woodsman he shall sing it, And his axe shall mark the time; And the bearded lips of the boatman While his oarblades fall in rhyme; And the man with his fist on the throttle, And the man with his foot on the brake, And the man who will scoff at danger And die for a comrade’s sake; And the Hand that wrought the Vision With prairie and peak and stream Shall guide the hand of the workman And help him to trace his dream!— Till the rugged lines grow perfect, And round to a faultless whole; For the West will have found her singer When her singer has found his soul. These are fine, swinging strophes, proclaiming the modern ideal from Whitman to Kipling that “the song that is fit for men” must have in it some robust timbre, some resonant fibre, unheard before; that a sturdier race of bards must arise, “sprung from the toilers at the bench and plough,”—that, in fine, the new America must have a more orotund voice to sing her needs.