beauty of ideas in the nude, but from a doubt on the part of the
conservatives as to whether one can capture ideal beauty without an
accurately woven net of words. Nor do the vers-librists prove that they
are less concerned with form than are other poets. "The poet must learn
his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the
cabinet maker," says Amy Lowell. [Footnote: Preface to _Sword Blades
and Poppy Seed_.] The disagreement among poets on this point is
proving itself to be not so great as some had supposed. The ideal of
most singers, did they possess the secret, is to do as Mrs. Browning
advises them,

Keep up the fire
And leave the generous flames to shape themselves.
[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.]

Whether the poet toils for years to form a shrine for his thought, or
whether his awe forbids him to touch his first unconscious formulation
of it, there comes a time when all that he can do has been done, and he
realizes that he will never approximate his vision more closely than
this. Then, indeed, as high as was his rapture during the moment of
revelation, so deep is likely to be his discouragement with his powers
of creation, for, however fair he may feel his poem to be, it yet does
not fill the place of what he has lost. Thus Francis Thompson sighs over
the poet,

When the embrace has failed, the rapture fled,
Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead,
And though he cherisheth
The babe most strangely born from out her death,
Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe,