Volume 146 — "PEREANT QUI ANTE NOS...."

["Before the Love of Letters, overdone, Had swamped the sacred poets with themselves."—Tennyson.]

"The poets of an older time," Grumbled Rossetti Jones one day, "Have used up every blessed rhyme And collared every thought sublime, Leaving us nothing new to say. "They've sung the Game of War as played By gods and men, heroic peers; They've sung the love of man and maid, To Life their laughing tribute paid, Nor grudged grim Death his toll of tears. "What can a modern poet sing, Describe, imagine or invent? They've been before, they've tapped the spring, They've laid their hands on everything, Staked out the spacious firmament. "Last week, a line that did me proud Flashed on me, strolling down the Strand:— 'I wandered lonely as a cloud;' Then conscience suddenly avowed The simile was second-hand. "Take birds, for instance. No remark Of mine on birds could but be stale; Shelley and Wordsworth own the lark (Which Shakspeare too had bid us hark), While Keats has bagged the nightingale. "With rose and lily surfeited, Burns sang the daisy. Here's a fraud Of Tennyson's: I might have said How daisies crimson 'neath the tread Of more attractive girls than Maud! "You think you've something up to date? You'll find it's been already done; I'd like to clean the blooming slate; Their footprints I'd obliterate; I want my corner in the sun." He ceased. "Yet your revenge," I said, Taking a classic from his shelves, "Is ample, surely"; there I read How moderns vex the sacred dead, Swamping old poets with themselves.