I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time,
In predecease of his just-sickening song,
Of him that set, wrapped in his radiant rhyme,
Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long.
Obviously we are in the wake of the Rousseau theory, acclimatized in English poetry by Wordsworth's youth "who daily farther from the east must travel." A long array of poets testifies to the doctrine that a poet's first days are his best. [Footnote: See S. T. Coleridge, Youth and Age; J. G. Percival, Poetry; William Cullen Bryant, I Cannot Forget with What Fervid Devotion; Bayard Taylor, The Return of the Goddess; Richard Watson Gilder, To a Young Poet, The Poet's Secret; George Henry Boker, To Bayard Taylor; Martin Farquhar Tupper, To a Young Poet; William E. Henley, Something Is Dead; Francis Thompson, From the Night of Foreboding; Thomas Hardy, In the Seventies; Lewis Morris, On a Young Poet; Richard Le Gallienne, A Face in a Book; Richard Middleton, The Faithful Poet, The Boy Poet; Don Marquis, The Singer (1915); John Hall Wheelock, The Man to his Dead Poet (1919); Cecil Roberts, The Youth of Beauty (1915); J. Thorne Smith, jr., The Lost Singer (1920); Edna St. Vincent Millay, To a Poet that Died Young.] Optima dies … prima fugit; the note echoes and reechoes through English poetry. Hear it in Arnold's Progress of Poetry:
Youth rambles on life's arid mount,
And strikes the rock and finds the vein,
And brings the water from the fount.
The fount which shall not flow again.
The man mature with labor chops
For the bright stream a channel grand,
And sees not that the sacred drops
Ran off and vanished out of hand.
And then the old man totters nigh
And feebly rakes among the stones;
The mount is mute, the channel dry,
And down he lays his weary bones.
But the strangle hold of complimentary verse upon English poetry, if nothing else, would prevent this view being unanimously expressed there. For in the Victorian period, poets who began their literary careers by prophesying their early decease lived on and on. They themselves might bewail the loss of their gift in old age—in fact, it was usual for them to do so [Footnote: See Scott, Farewell to the Muse; Landor, Dull is my Verse; J. G. Percival, Invocation; Matthew Arnold, Growing Old; Longfellow, My Books; O. W. Holmes, The Silent Melody; C. W. Stoddard, The Minstrel's Harp; P. H. Hayne, The Broken Chords; J. C. MacNiel, A Prayer; Harvey Hubbard, The Old Minstrel.]—but it would never do for their disciples to concur in the sentiment. Consequently we have a flood of complimentary verses, assuring the great poets of their unaltered charm.[Footnote: See Swinburne, Age and Song, The Centenary of Landor, Statue of Victor Hugo; O. W. Holmes, Whittier's Eightieth Birthday, Bryant's Seventieth Birthday; E. E. Stedman, Ad Vatem; P. H. Hayne, To Longfellow; Richard Gilder, Jocoseria; M. F. Tupper, To the Poet of Memory; Edmund Gosse, To Lord Tennyson on his Eightieth Birthday; Alfred Noyes, Ode for the Seventieth Birthday of Swinburne; Alfred Austin, The Poet's Eightieth Birthday; Lucy Larcom, J. G. Whittier; Mary Clemmer, To Whittier; Percy Mackaye, Browning to Ben Ezra.] And of course it is all worth very little as indicating the writer's attitude toward old age. Yet the fact that Landor was still singing as he "tottered on into his ninth decade,"—that Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, Longfellow, Whittier, Holme's, and Whitman continued to feel the stir of creation when their hair was hoary, may have had a genuine influence on younger writers.
Greater significance attaches to the fact that some of the self-revealing verse lamenting the decay of inspiration in old age is equivocal, as Landor's
Dull is my verse: not even thou
Who movest many cares away
From this lone breast and weary brow
Canst make, as once, its fountains play;
No, nor those gentle words that now
Support my heart to hear thee say,
The bird upon the lonely bough
Sings sweetest at the close of day.
It is, of course, even more meaningful when the aged poet, disregarding convention, frankly asserts the desirability of long life for his race. Browning, despite the sadness of the poet's age recorded in Cleon and the Prologue to Aslando, should doubtless be remembered for his belief in
The last of life for which the first was made,