telling. A number of later poets have written pathetic tales showing the
tragic results of the unimaginative public's denial of the poet's
delicate perceptions of truth. [Footnote: See Jean Ingelow, _Gladys
and her Island;_ Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Singer's Hills;_ J. G.
Holland, _Jacob Hurd's Child._]

To the poet's excited imagination, it seems as if all the world regarded
his race as a constantly increasing swarm of flies, and had started in
on a systematic course of extirpation. [Footnote: See G. K. Chesterton,
_More Poets Yet._] As for the professional critic, he becomes an
ogre, conceived of as eating a poet for breakfast every morning. The new
singer is invariably warned by his brothers that he must struggle for
his honor and his very life against his malicious audience. It is
doubtful if we could find a poet of consequence in the whole period who
does not somewhere characterize men of his profession as the martyrs of
beauty. [Footnote: Examples of abstract discussions of this sort are:
Burns, _The Poet's Progress;_ Keats, _Epistle to George Felton Matthew;_
Tennyson, _To ---- After Reading a Life and Letters;_ Longfellow, _The
Poets;_ Thomas Buchanan Read, _The Master Poets;_ Paul Hamilton Hayne,
_Though Dowered with Instincts;_ Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy;_
George Meredith, _Bellerophon;_ S. L. Fairfield, _The Last Song_ (1832);
S. J. Cassells, _A Poet's Reflections_ (1851); Richard Gilder, _The New
Poet;_ Richard Realf, _Advice Gratis_ (1898); James Whitcomb Riley, _An
Outworn Sappho;_ Paul Laurence Dunbar, _The Poet;_ Theodore Watts-
Dunton, _The Octopus of the Golden Isles;_ Francis Ledwidge, _The Coming
Poet._] Shelley is particularly wrought up on the subject, and in _The
Woodman and the Nightingale_ expresses through an allegory the murderous
designs of the public.

A salient example of more vicarious indignation is Mrs. Browning, who