romance that lured the poet to immortalize them in verse. The closest approximation to such a thing is in the redundant complimentary verse, with which the New England poets showered each other to such an extent as to arouse Lowell's protest.1 Even they, however, did not represent themselves as living in Bohemian intimacy. Possibly the tempera-\ mental jealousy that the philistine world ascribes to the artist, causing him to feel that he is the one elect soul sent to a benighted age, while his brotherartists are akin to the money-changers in the temple, hinders him from unreserved enjoyment even of his fellows' society. Tennyson's and Swinburne's outbreaks against contemporary writers appear to be based on some such assumption.2

Consequently the poet is likely to celebrate one or two deep friendships in an otherwise lonely life. A few instances of such friendships are so notable, that the reader is likely to overlook their rarity. Such were the friendships of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, also that recorded in Landor's shaken lines:

Friends! hear the words my wandering thoughts would

say,

And cast them into shape some other day;
Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone,
And shattered with the fall, I stand alone.

'See Tennyson, The New Timon and the Poet; Bulwer Lytton, The New Timon; Swinburne, Essay on Whitman. For more recent manifestation of the same attitude see John Drinkwater, To Alice Meynell (1911); Shaemas O'Sheel, The Poets with the Sounding Gong (1912); Robert Graves, The Voice of Beauty Drowned (1920).

The intimacy of Shelley and Byron, recorded in Julian and Maddalo, was of a less ardent sort. Indeed Byron said of it, "As to friendship, it is a propensity in which my genius is very limited. . . . I did not even feel it for Shelley, however much I admired him." 1 Arnold's Thyrsis, Tennyson's In Memoriam, and more recently, George Edward Woodberry's North Shore Watch, indicate that even when the poet has been able to find a human soul which understood him, the friendship has been cut short by death. In fact, the premature close of such friendships has usually been the occasion for their celebration in verse, from classic times onward.

Such friendships, like happy love-affairs, are too infrequent and transitory to dissipate the poet's conviction that he is the loneliest of men. "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," might have been written by almost any nineteenth century poet about any other. Shelley, in particular, in spite of his not infrequent attachments, is almost obsessed by melancholy reflection upon his loneliness. In To a Skylark, he pictures the poet "hidden in the light of thought." Employing the opposite figure in the Defense of Poetry, he says, "The poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer his own solitude." Of the poet in Alastor we are told,

He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude.

Shelley's sense of his personal loneliness is recorded 'Letter to Mrs. (Shelley?) undated.

in Stanzas Written in Dejection, and also in Adonais. In the latter poem he says of himself,

He came the last, neglected and apart,

and describes himself as

companionless

As the last cloud of an expiring storm,
Whose thunder is its knell.

Victorian poets were not less depressed by reflection upon the poet's lonely life. Arnold strikes the note again and again, most poignantly in The BuriedLife, of the poet's sensitive apprehension that all human intercourse is mockery, and that the gifted soul really dwells in isolation. Sordello is a monu-mental record of a genius without friends. Francis Thompson, with surface lightness, tells us, in A Renegade Poet on the Poet:

He alone of men, though he travel to the pit, picks up no company by the way; but has a contrivance to avoid scripture, and find a narrow road to damnation. Indeed, if the majority of men go to the nether abodes, 'tis the most hopeful argument I know of his salvation, for 'tis inconceivable that he should ever do as other men.

One might imagine that in the end the poet's poignant sense of his isolation might allay his excessive conceit. A yearning for something beyond himself might lead him to infer a lack in his own nature. Seldom, however, is this the result of the poet's loneliness. Francis Thompson, indeed, does

feel himself humbled by his spiritual solitude, and characterizes himself,

I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech,
Love their love or mine own love to them teach,
A bastard barred from their inheritance,

In antre of this lowly body set,

Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul.1

But the typical poet yearns not downward, but upward, and above him he finds nothing. Therefore reflection upon his loneliness continually draws his attention to the fact that his isolation is an inevitable consequence of his genius,-that he

Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foiled searching of mortality."

The poet usually looks for alleviation of his loneliness after death, when he is gathered to the company of his peers, but to the supreme poet he feels that even this satisfaction is denied. The highest genius must exist absolutely in and for itself, the poet-egoist is led to conclude, for it will "remain at heart unread eternally." "

Such is the self-perpetuating principle which appears to insure perennial growth of the poet's egoism. The mystery of inspiration breeds introspection; introspection breeds egoism; egoism breeds pride; pride breeds contempt for other men; contempt for other men breeds hostility and persecution; perse1 Sister Songs.

Matthew Arnold, Sonnet, Shakespeare.

Thomas Hardy, To Shakespeare.

cution breeds proud isolation. Finally, isolation breeds deeper introspection, and the poet is ready to start on a second revolution of the egocentric circle.