Goddess_; Richard Watson Gilder, _To a Young Poet_, _The Poet's Secret_;
George Henry Boker, _To Bayard Taylor_; Martin Farquhar Tupper, _To a
Young Poet_; William E. Henley, _Something Is Dead_; Francis Thompson,
_From the Night of Foreboding_; Thomas Hardy, _In the Seventies_; Lewis
Morris, _On a Young Poet_; Richard Le Gallienne, _A Face in a Book_;
Richard Middleton, _The Faithful Poet, The Boy Poet_; Don Marquis, _The
Singer_ (1915); John Hall Wheelock, _The Man to his Dead Poet_ (1919);
Cecil Roberts, _The Youth of Beauty_ (1915); J. Thorne Smith, jr., _The
Lost Singer_ (1920); Edna St. Vincent Millay, _To a Poet that Died
Young_.] _Optima dies_ ... _prima fugit_; the note echoes and reechoes
through English poetry. Hear it in Arnold's _Progress of Poetry_:

Youth rambles on life's arid mount,
And strikes the rock and finds the vein,
And brings the water from the fount.
The fount which shall not flow again.

The man mature with labor chops
For the bright stream a channel grand,
And sees not that the sacred drops
Ran off and vanished out of hand.

And then the old man totters nigh
And feebly rakes among the stones;
The mount is mute, the channel dry,
And down he lays his weary bones.

But the strangle hold of complimentary verse upon English poetry, if
nothing else, would prevent this view being unanimously expressed there.
For in the Victorian period, poets who began their literary careers by