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But the most far-reaching of the doubtful tendencies in modern 
poetry is one of mood. It assumes many forms and a variety of 
phases. They lack what Emerson called the ‘ royal trait” of 
‘cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,—for beauty 
is his aim. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over 
the universe.’’ On account of their having those characteristics, 
so aptly expressed by Emerson, our old English singers have 
been compared most felicitously to singing birds who greet the 
morning with their lays, and delight the ears of all listeners by 
spontaneous outbursts of joy. Our modern poet mostly lacks cheer- 
fulness. He is of gloomymood, The mildest form of this tendency 
is that of simple melancholy. Tennyson is not free from this 
phase, for his ‘‘ Locksley Hall” is permeated mildly with it, and 
the poem beginning “I stood on a tower in the wet "’ is saturated 
with it. Another phase of the sad mood is that of mawkish melan- 
choly. It is an affected moroseness. Bunthorne in Gilbert’s 
“ Patience’ is a representative of such poets, for their chief 
delight is found in the pensive pleasure of asigh. Still another 
phase of the doubtful mood is an apparent disgust of our time. 
For the most part the melancholy poets are comfortably off, but 
they do not write from the inspiration of their surroundings. 
They insert their pens in the ink of gloom and of things that never 
were, which are not now, and which never can be at any time. 
Life they say is not worth living, but still they live it, and they 
do not appear to fare at all badly, except in the estimation of 
sensible and cheerful critics. But the very worst phase of the 
doubtful mood is the one which is characterised by a spirit of 
hopeless despair. This disposition produces nothing even in the 
direction of a great poem, for out of nothing nothing can possibly 
come, and whether this melancholy spirit informs a Rossetti, a 
Swinburne, a Thompson, a Morris, or a Whitman, it is a 
hindrance instead of being a help to the production of true 
poetry, and is consequently a hindrance rather than a help to 
the life of our time. 
The foundation for these doubtful tendencies will be found in 
false views which are taken of the realities of life. There is no 
robustness of faith. Most of our versifiers have not kept pace 
with the spirit of progress, for knowledge and character never 
did stand higher than they do to-day, and so the versified ery, 
in its matter and in its mood alike, is little more than a betrayal 
of the versifier’s own personal poverty of spirit. A low earth- 
mist appears to have shrouded those who have lost the power of 
seeing as they might and they only know of the sunlight by 
tradition. It is a sad spectacle when the poet is reduced to evil 
predictions or to gloomy retrospects, when he sees nature only as 
blind and brutal, and when he hears only cries of anguish and 
gnashing of teeth. The poet of the present seems often to have 
