generation. The truant and irregular poetry of his own nature, all
in solution there, found an external and authorised mouthpiece,
ranging itself rightfully, as the latest achievement of human soul in
this matter, along with the consecrated poetic voices of the past.

Poetry! Hitherto it had seemed hopelessly chained to the bookshelf,
like something in a dead language, "dead, and shut up in reliquaries
of books," or like those relics "one may only see through a little
pane of glass," as one of its recent "liberators" had said. Sure,
apparently, of its own "niche in the temple of Fame," the recognised
poetry of literature had had the [52] pretension to defy or
discredit, as depraved and irredeemably vulgar, the poetic motions in
the living genius of to-day. Yet the genius of to-day, extant and
forcible, the wakeful soul of present time consciously in possession,
would assert its poetic along with all its other rights; and in
regard to the curiosity, the intellectual interest, of Gaston, for
instance, it had of course the advantage of being close at hand, with
the effectiveness of a personal presence. Studious youth, indeed, on
its mettle about "scholarship," though actually of listless humour
among books that certainly stirred the past, makes a docile act of
faith regarding the witchery, the thaumaturgic powers, of Virgil, or
may we say of Shakespeare? Yet how faint and dim, after all, the
sorrows of Dido, of Juliet, the travail of Aeneas, beside quite
recent things felt or done--stories which, floating to us on the
light current of to-day's conversation, leave the soul in a flutter!
At best, poetry of the past could move one with no more directness
than the beautiful faces of antiquity which are not here for us to
see and unaffectedly love them. Gaston's demand (his youth only
conforming to pattern therein) was for a poetry, as veritable, as
intimately near, as corporeal, as the new faces of the hour, the