Preface
taper or pulls a posy for Dryden or Schiller or Alfieri? We admire them sincerely; in theory, we love them. How often in the year do we take down their works and read them? Take the case of a writer who, in his person, unites one of the greatest of epic writers to the most exquisite of minor poets : which do we read the more often, "Lycidas" or "Paradise Regained"?… I live in a Catholic country where almost every city boasts of its historic cathedral. They are nearly always empty. But turn down the side street, enter yon barn-like chapel topped by a wooden cross : the whitewashed walls of the sanctuary of St. Anthony ot Padua are thronged with worshippers intimate and devout. St. Peter and St. Paul have their incomparable domes; save on highdays and holidays, they have them all to themselves! In the work-a-day hours of life, when you snatch at a prayer in passing, as you pluck a rose over a fence, half furtively—the swift petition, the familiar avowal, are, apparently, for the Lesser Saint. The chapel of the Minor Poet may be too small to admit the crowd; it may be thronged when three or four are gathered together. None the less, it has its use and place. It is, I believe, a mistake, to suppose, as Tolstoy contends, that no Art is legitimate save that which has for its object the happiness of the greatest number. Yet I admit that the poet who consciously addresses a few is, by definition, the Minor Poet, the man of a smaller race, the younger brother, who, whatever his merits, shall not obtain the full inheritance.
"Shall Life be an Ode? Or shall Life be a Drama?" wrote one day James Darmesteter, the friend of all my verses and the occasion of many among them. My life has been an Ode, of which those pages are the scattered fragments. If ever I have escaped from its tranquil sequences, it has been but for an instant and through some partial opening of the gates of Imagination, set in movement by some incident in real life or some episode of my reading.
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