among poets of the last century,--at least they were overhung by no
glamor of romance that lured the poet to immortalize them in verse. The
closest approximation to such a thing is in the redundant complimentary
verse, with which the New England poets showered each other to such an
extent as to arouse Lowell's protest. [Footnote: See _A Fable for
Critics_.] Even they, however, did not represent themselves as living in
Bohemian intimacy. Possibly the temperamental jealousy that the
philistine world ascribes to the artist, causing him to feel that he is
the one elect soul sent to a benighted age, while his brother-artists
are akin to the money-changers in the temple, hinders him from
unreserved enjoyment even of his fellows' society. Tennyson's and
Swinburne's outbreaks against contemporary writers appear to be based on
some such assumption. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _The New Timon and the
Poet_; Bulwer Lytton, _The New Timon_; Swinburne, _Essay on Whitman_.
For more recent manifestation of the same attitude see John Drinkwater,
_To Alice Meynell_ (1911); Shaemas O'Sheel, _The Poets with the Sounding
Gong_ (1912); Robert Graves, _The Voice of Beauty Drowned_ (1920).]

Consequently the poet is likely to celebrate one or two deep friendships
in an otherwise lonely life. A few instances of such friendships are so
notable, that the reader is likely to overlook their rarity. Such were
the friendships of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of Wordsworth and his
sister Dorothy, also that recorded in Landor's shaken lines:

Friends! hear the words my wandering thoughts would say,
And cast them into shape some other day;
Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone,
And shattered with the fall, I stand alone.

The intimacy of Shelley and Byron, recorded in _Julian and Maddalo_, was