was all let out in building lots, or that the steam whistle had quite
'frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns'?

Since then I have taken up the reviewing of minor verse as a part of my
livelihood, and where I once saw the New Jerusalem I see now the New
Journalism.

There are, doubtless, many who still cherish that boyish dream of the
poet. He still stalks through the popular imagination with his Spanish hat
and cloak, his amaranthine locks, his finely-frenzied eyes, and his
Alastor-like forgetfulness of his meals. But only, it is to be feared, for
a little time. For the latter-day poet is doing his best to dissipate that
venerable tradition. Bitten by the modern passion for uniformity, he has
French-cropped those locks, in which, as truly as with Samson, lay his
strength, he has discarded his sombrero for a Lincoln and Bennett, he
cultivates a silky moustache, a glossy boot, and has generally given
himself into the hands of the West-End tailor. Stung beyond endurance by
taunts of his unpracticality, he enters Parliament, edits papers, keeps
accounts, and is in every way a better business man than his publisher.

This is all very well for a little time. The contrast amuses by its
piquancy. To write of wild and whirling things in your books, but in
public life to be associated with nothing more wild and whirling than a
shirt-fronted eye-glassed hansom; to be at heart an Alastor, but in
appearance a bank-clerk, delights an age of paradox.

But, though it may pay for a while, it will, I am sure, prove a disastrous
policy in the long run. The poet unborn shall, I am certain, rue it. The
next generation of poets (or, indeed, writers generally) will reap a
sorrowful harvest from the gratuitous disillusionment with which the