Was known to him before her very birth.
[Footnote: _The Poet's Fame_. In the same spirit is _Invitation_, by J.
E. Flecker.]

The foundation of the poet's superiority is, of course, his claim that
his inspiration gives him mystical experience of the things which the
scholar can only remotely speculate about. Therefore Percy Mackaye makes
Sappho vaunt over the philosopher, Pittacus:

Yours is the living pall,
The aloof and frozen place of listeners
And lookers-on at life. But mine--ah! Mine
The fount of life itself, the burning fount
Pierian. I pity you.
[Footnote: _Sappho and Phaon_, a drama.]

Very likely Pittacus had no answer to Sappho's boast, but when the
average nondescript verse-writer claims that his intuitions are
infinitely superior to the results of scholarly research, the man of
reason is not apt to keep still. And one feels that the poet, in many
cases, has earned such a retort as that recorded by Young:

How proud the poet's billow swells!
The God! the God! his boast:
A boast how vain! what wrecks abound!
Dead bards stench every coast.
[Footnote: _Resignation_.]

There could be no more telling blow against the poet's view of
inspiration than this. Even so pronounced a romanticist as Mrs. Browning