2d. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of Imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. But it is easier to think what poetry should be than to write it—and this leads me to
Another axiom—That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.
Some people can always find things to complain about. We have seen protests because the house in Rome where Keats died is used as a steamship office. We think it is rather appropriate. No man's mind ever set sail upon wider oceans of imagination. To paraphrase Emily Dickinson:
Night after night his purple traffic
Strews the landing with opal bales;
Merchantmen poise upon horizons,
Dip, and vanish with fairy sails.
Another pleasing fact is that while he was a medical student Keats lived in Bird-in-Hand Court, Cheapside—best known nowadays as the home of Simpson's, that magnificent chophouse. Who else, in modern times, came so close to holding unruffled in his hand the shy wild bird of Poetry?
A CITY NOTE-BOOK
Well, now let us see in what respect we are richer to-day than we were yesterday.