one's train of thought be thrown out of gear by a consecutive piping
of vocal reeds in jarring tonics, without a semiquaver's rest
between, and be led thereby to miss the writer's aim and meaning in
one out of two contiguous compositions, I shall deeply regret it.

Having at last, I think, finished with the personal points that I was
recommended to notice, I will forsake the immediate object of this
Preface; and, leaving Late Lyrics to whatever fate it deserves,
digress for a few moments to more general considerations. The
thoughts of any man of letters concerned to keep poetry alive cannot
but run uncomfortably on the precarious prospects of English verse at
the present day. Verily the hazards and casualties surrounding the
birth and setting forth of almost every modern creation in numbers
are ominously like those of one of Shelley's paper-boats on a windy
lake. And a forward conjecture scarcely permits the hope of a better
time, unless men's tendencies should change. So indeed of all art,
literature, and "high thinking" nowadays. Whether owing to the
barbarizing of taste in the younger minds by the dark madness of the
late war, the unabashed cultivation of selfishness in all classes,
the plethoric growth of knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of
wisdom, "a degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation" (to quote
Wordsworth again), or from any other cause, we seem threatened with a
new Dark Age.

I formerly thought, like so many roughly handled writers, that so far
as literature was concerned a partial cause might be impotent or
mischievous criticism; the satirizing of individuality, the lack of
whole-seeing in contemporary estimates of poetry and kindred work,
the knowingness affected by junior reviewers, the overgrowth of
meticulousness in their peerings for an opinion, as if it were a