PREFATORY I do not condescend to add a preface to my little book merely because the contrary is customary and modern, but because of the manifest prejudice on the part of a certain class of book-buyers who affect not to be able to appreciate poetry unless the author has a recognized place in literature. If this ipse dixit class could but realize that poetry is a gift; that poets are born, not made; and that all Poetry is the direct result of Inspiration, and that the obscure poet is as liable to produce something of merit as well as the genius with a name, then indeed would a preface in my opinion be superfluous. But realizing how prone is man to "ape the scholar," and to accept the "dictum of the critic" through the "scholarly utterances of the press " as final; beyond which there is no appeal, not even salt wherewith to savor the monotony of their erudition, permit me to state in prose, that sounds, like perfumes, have the privilege to waft us far from ourselves, across time and space beyond the reach of censure or of praise; and that to be able to appreciate harmony so elevating is worth an effort on the part of all who have no knowledge of the divine afflatus. A German philosopher once said: "Mozart, who to us is a god, appeared as a savage to the Americans, who were unable to appreciate him." Would Phidias and Virgil have been more to our taste? I doubt it. Prose is for all the world, poetry for almost all the world, but music is only for the few. Prose expresses ideas, poetry sentiments, music feelings, and these feelings are of a character so subtle that not every man is able to accept their sensitiveness. I think music is as inferior to poetry as poetry is superior to prose. It is but the reflection of a shadow; but what a brilliant, delicious, sublime reflection it is to those who have learnt to enjoy it! Take poetry from the world, song from the people, and you rob them of a birthright far more civilizing and enduring than is enunciated by all the tomes of history and fiction combined. THE OFFICES OF THE POET. In all ages the poet has been and still is the recognized leader and teacher of men. Naturally so, because he was the first among philosophers and scholars of all eras; and the precepts laid down by the earliest poets stand to-day in the forefront of scholastic teaching. The poet is by birth a moralist, a sermonizer, a truth-seeker and freethinker, who detects the wrongs of his time and points the way to right them. He is the seer of the ages, and that nation is wise who heeds his clarion voice. "His home is in the heights: to him He presses on before the race, |