DE LA MARE. Which may be interpreted that he could not admire the green linnet without intimating that there is a soul in Nature.

FREEMAN. Milton does not abound in objective poetry, Pope still less, but we shall find several poems that come within our definition in the Songs of Innocence, none, I am afraid, in the Songs of Experience. From Shelley we shall gather a handful: the Hymn to Pan and The Cloud. Would you admit The Cloud, De La Mare?

DE LA MARE. The Cloud is not so good a poem as the Hymn to Pan, but it comes within our definition.

MOORE. There is The Sensitive Plant; a more beautiful description of a garden was never written.

DE LA MARE. But he includes an Indian maiden in the second part, and he ends the poem with a morality:

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,

To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

MOORE. I see your point, but why not the first part of The Sensitive Plant?

DE LA MARE. If you admit a right of search for objective stanzas our quest will never end. The most beautiful poetry in The Ancient Mariner is the objective poetry

FREEMAN. And the inclusion of these passages will be a criticism of poetry.

DE LA MARE. Yes; but I think we had better limit the anthology to complete poems.

FREEMAN. I am afraid we shall find very little in Keats.

DE LA MARE. I doubt if we shall find anything. We can't have the Ode to a Grecian Urn; it is barred by its subjectivity, likewise the Ode to the Nightingale. The Eve of St. Agnes is a long narrative poem

FREEMAN. If we are not to have a single quotation from Keats

DE LA MARE. There is only one way of settling our differences, and that is to put the poems to the vote; any poem that doesn't receive two votes will be rejected.

MOORE. Keats never attracted me. I know he is the fashion, but I am more interested in my own than in other people's taste, and I think of him too frequently as a pussy cat on a sunny lawn. In Poe

DE LA MARE. We shall find many poems in Poe. There is, of course, the poem To Helen:

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in
yon
brilliant window niche
How Statue-like I see thee stand,

The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!

The last lines of The Raven exclude the

our anthology:

poem from

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!

Quoth the raven, Nevermore.

Our difficulty with Poe will be not to overburden our pages with him. We shall have to consider Dreamland:

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,

I have reached these lands but newly

From an ultimate dim Thule

From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,

Out of Space-out of Time.

And there can be little doubt that we must include The City in the Sea:

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West.

We are all agreed about The City in the Sea? And Eulalie:

I dwelt alone

In a world of moan,

And my soul was a stagnant tide,

Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing

bride

FREEMAN. No! No! No!

MOORE. No! No! No!

DE LA MARE. Ah, less-less bright

The stars of the night

Than the eyes of the radiant girl!

ALL. No! No! No!

DE LA MARE. Eulalie has found no supporters. What about The Haunted Palace?

In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,

Once a fair and stately palace-
Radiant palace-reared its head.

MOORE. Yes.

DE LA MARE. And you, Freeman?
FREEMAN. Yes.

DE LA MARE. The Haunted Palace goes in. Among the late poems The Bells

FREEMAN. A trick! A trick!

DE LA MARE. The beautiful poem To Helen, the second one, contains some subjective lines which I think you will agree debars it. Eldorado is a beautiful poem, but we agreed to accept nothing but poems of the first rank. Then there is Ulalume:

The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crispéd and sere-

MOORE. I am wholeheartedly for Ulalume. FREEMAN. I am not wholeheartedly for Ulalume, but I am for its inclusion.

DE LA MARE. We have come down to modern times, and it behooves us to make sure that we have not overlooked anybody of first importance in this preliminary investigation.

DE LA MARE. An august soul, and yet we overlooked him!

FREEMAN. Landor's prose has obscured the beauty of his verse.

DE LA MARE. I confess my ignorance, I will not say unblushingly but without hesitation, and I doubt, Freeman, if you know Landor much better than I do. But Moore reads little else and will tell us what to seek in Landor.

MOORE. In Gebir a shepherd tells another how a nymph came up one night from the sea and engaged with him in a wrestling match, the terms of which were that he should receive sinuous shells of pearly hue if he were the victor, and that she should receive from him, if she were the victor, a sheep:

Now came she forward eager to engage,
But first her dress, her bosom then survey'd,
And heav'd it, doubting if she could deceive
Her bosom seem'd, inclos'd in haze like heav'n,
To baffle touch, and rose forth undefined: