"As you please, Sir Walter."

"No! As you please, Gentle Reader. If you have nothing else in mind, how would this do for a start?

'Waken! Lords and Ladies gay!

On the mountain dawns the day.'

It's a fine morning, and it's a gallant company! Let's go with them!"

"Let's!" cries the Gentle Reader.

The Enjoyment of Poetry

ROWNING'S description of the effect of the recital of classic poetry upon a band of piratical Greeks must seem to many persons to be exaggerated:

"Then, because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts, And poetry is power, they all outbroke

In a great joyous laughter with much love."

Because Americans are Americans, and business is business, and time is money, and life is earnest, we take our poetry much more seriously than that. We are ready to form classes to study it and to discuss it, but these solemn assemblies are not likely to be disturbed by outbursts of "great joyous laughter."

We usually accept poetry as mental discipline. It is as if the poet said, "Go to, now. I will

produce a masterpiece." Thereupon the conscientious reader answers, "Very well; I can stand it. I will apply myself with all diligence, that by means of it I may improve my mind." Who has not sometimes quailed before the long row of British Poets in uniform binding, standing stiffly side by side, like so many British grenadiers on dress parade? Who has not felt his courage ooze away at the sight of those melancholy volumes labeled Complete Poetical Works? Poetical Remains they used to call them, and there is something funereal in their aspect.

The old hymn says, "Religion never was designed to make our pleasures less," and the same thing ought to be said about poetry. The distaste for poetry arises largely from the habit of treating it as if it were only a more difficult kind of prose. We are so much under the tyranny of the scientific method that the habits of the schoolroom intrude, and we try to extract instruction from what was meant to give us joy. The prosaic commentary obscures the beauty of the text, so that

"The glad old romance, the gay chivalrous story,
With its fables of faery, its legends of glory,

Is turned to a tedious instruction, not new,

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To the children, who read it insipidly through." One of the most ruthless invasions of the saic faculties into the realm of poetry comes from the thirst for general information. When this thirst becomes a disease, it is not satisfied with census reports and encyclopædia articles, but values literature according to the number of facts presented. Suppose these lines from "Paradise Lost" to be taken for study:

"Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks

In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades
High over-arched embower, or scattered sedge
Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armed

Hath vexed the Red Sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew
Busiris and his Memphian chivalry."

What an opportunity this presents to the schoolmaster! "Come now," he cries with pedagogic glee, “answer me a few questions. Where is Vallombrosa? What is the character of its autumnal foliage? Bound Etruria. What is sedge? Explain the myth of Orion? Point out the constellation on the map of the heavens. Where is the Red Sea? Who was Busiris? By what other name was he known? Who were the Memphian Chivalry?"

Here is material for exhaustive research in geography, ancient and modern, history, botany, astronomy, meteorology, chronology, and archæology. The industrious student may get almost as much information out of "Paradise Lost" from one of those handy compilations of useful knowledge, which are sold on the railway cars for twenty-five cents. As for the poetry of Milton, that is another matter.

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Next to the temptation to use a poem as a receptacle for a mass of collateral information is that to use it for the display of one's own penetration. As in the one case it is treated as if it were an encyclopædia article, in the other it is treated as if it were a verbal puzzle. It is taken for granted that the intention of the poet is to conceal thought, and the game is for the reader to find it out. We are hunting for hidden meanings, and we greet one another with the grim salutation of the creatures in the jungle: "Good hunting!" "What is the meaning of this passage?" Who has not heard this sudden question propounded in regard to the most transparent sentence from an author who is deemed