flame unsuffocated by crowding and scrutiny.

The poet lives in an alien world. That is not his pride; it is his
humility. It is often his joy, but often also his misery: he must
dree his weird. His necessary solitude of spirit is not luxury, nor
the gesture of a churl: it is his sacrifice, it is the condition on
which he lives. He must be content to seem boorish to the general in
order to be tender to his duty. He has invisible guests at the table
of his heart: those places are reserved against all comers. He must
be their host first of all, or he is damned. He serves the world by
cutting it when they meet inopportunely. There are times (as Keats
said and Christ implied) when the wind and the stars are his wife
and children.

There will be a thousand pressures to bare his bosom to the lunacy
of public dinners, lecture platforms, and what not pleasant
folderol. He must be privileged apparent ruffian discourtesy. He has
his own heart-burn to consider. One thinks of Rudyard Kipling in
this connection. Mr. Kipling stands above all other men of letters
to-day in the brave clearness with which he has made it plain that
he consorts first of all with his own imagination.

As the poet sees the world, and studies, the more he realizes that
men are sharply cut in two classes: those who understand, those who
do not. With the latter he speaks a foreign language and with
effort, trying shamefacedly to conceal his strangeness. With these,
perhaps, every moment spent is for ever lost. With the others he can
never commune enough, seeking clumsily to share and impart those
moments of rare intuition when truth came near. There is rarely any
doubt as to this human division: the heart knows its kin.