Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/152

140 anything but his own personality has rapidly increased with years. For, being one of these happy souls to whom thought is not a necessity but rather a nuisance, he has grown less and less to care for such an absurd thing as balance. His ravenous emotions have made an end of him at last. Like his master, he has caught up a few poor ideas from here and there, and used them as a peg on which to hang the gorgeous vesture of his work, and been satisfied. Writers of 'leaders' in our newspapers understand this operation best, perhaps; but the poets have often run them close.

What, then, remains of value in the man's work? Just those parts of it, we say, of which he probably takes least heed—a line, a snatch, a verse, a song, scarcely any of them containing the qualities on which he would insist as his most peculiar excellence.

To have to repeat all this in detail, in considering his later work, would be as wearisome as it would be stupid. It would also be both ungrateful and ungracious. The fortunate hours have come less and less frequently with the poet as success and authority have loosened the bonds of self-restraint, until at last he has gone far towards turning his lyre into a barrel-organ. One puts down a book like A Midsummer's Holiday or the Sisters with the weary sense that there was little reason any of it should have been