as applied to poets as well as to other men. In America old age found its most enthusiastic advocate in Walt Whitman, who in lines To Get the Final Lilt of Songs indicated undiminished confidence in himself at eighty. Bayard Taylor, [Footnote: See My Prologue.] too, and Edward Dowden, [Footnote: See The Mage.] were not dismayed by their longevity.
But we are most concerned, naturally, with wholly impersonal verse, and in it the aged poet is never wholly absent from English thought. As the youthful singer suggests the southland, so the aged bard seems indigenous to the north. It seems inevitable that Gray should depict the Scotch bard as old, [Footnote: The Bard.] and that Scott's minstrels should be old. Campbell, too, follows the Scotch tradition. [Footnote: See Lochiel's Warning.] It is the prophetic power of these fictional poets, no doubt, that makes age seem essential to them. The poet in Campbell's poem explains,
'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore.
Outside of Scotch poetry one finds, occasionally, a similar faith in the old poet. Mrs. Browning's observation tells her that maturity alone can express itself with youthful freshness. Aurora declares,
I count it strange and hard to understand
That nearly all young poets should write old.
… It may be perhaps
Such have not settled long and deep enough
In trance to attain to clairvoyance, and still
The memory mixes with the vision, spoils
And works it turbid. Or perhaps again
In order to discover the Muse Sphinx
The melancholy desert must sweep around
Behind you as before.
Aurora feels, indeed, that the poet's gift is not proved till age. She sighs, remembering her own youth,
Alas, near all the birds
Will sing at dawn,—and yet we do not take
The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.
Coinciding with this feeling is Rossetti's sentiment:
… Many men are poets in their youth,
But for one sweet-strung soul the wires prolong
Even through all age the indomitable song.
[Footnote: Genius in Beauty.]
Alice Meynell, [Footnote: See To any Poet.] too, and Richard Watson Gilder [Footnote: See Life is a Bell.] feel that increasing power of song comes with age.
It is doubtless natural that the passionate romantic poets insisted upon the poet's youth, while the thoughtful Victorians often thought of himas old. For one is born with nerves, and it does not take long for them to wear out; on the other hand a great deal of experience is required before one can even begin to think significantly. Accordingly one is not surprised, in the turbulent times of Elizabeth, to find Shakespeare, at thirty, asserting,