"One such word in a million would have been too many. It made me feel that they would all have liked to say 'dankening,' or something of the sort. And in the new poets, on other occasions, I have found faulty syntax, bad rhymes, limping feet. The editors are to blame for that, when it happens. The editor who printed 'dankening' was more to blame than the poet who wrote it, and loved the other ugly word above all his other vocables." The elder poet was silent, and the other took fresh courage. "Yes, I say it! You were wrong in your praise of the present magazine verse at the cost of that in our day. When we were commencing poets, the young or younger reputations were those of Stedman, of Bayard Taylor, of the Stoddards, of Aldrich, of Celia Thaxter, of Rose Terry, of Harriet Prescott, of Bret Harte, of Charles Warren Stoddard, of the Piatts, of Fitz James O'Brien, of Fitzhugh Ludlow, of a dozen more, whom the best of the newest moderns cannot rival. These were all delicate and devoted and indefatigable artists and lovers of form. It cannot do the later generation any good to equal them with ours."
"There is something in what you say." The elder poet was silent for a time. Then he asked, "Out of the hundred poems you read in your fifty magazines, how many did you say were what you would call good?"
His junior counted up, and reported, "About twenty-four."
"Well, don't you call that pretty fair, in a hundred? I do. Reflect that these were all the magazines of one month, and it is probable that there will be as many good poems in the magazines of every month in the year. That will give us two hundred and eighty-eight good poems during 1907. Before the first decade of the new century is ended, we shall have had eleven hundred and fifty-two good magazine poems. Do you suppose that as many good magazine poems were written during the last four years of the first decade of the eighteenth century? Can you name as many yourself?"
"Certainly not. Nobody remembers the magazine poems of that time, and nobody will remember the poems of the four years ending the present decade."
"Do you mean to say that not one of them is worth remembering?"
The younger poet paused a moment. Then he said, with the air of a cross-examined witness, "Under advice of counsel, I decline to answer."
XV
COMPARATIVE LUXURIES OF TRAVEL