152 BIRDS AND POETS 
out of and reaches back again to the bones and the 
digestion. There is no grace like the grace of 
strength. What sheer muscular gripe and power 
le back of the firm, delicate notes of the great vio- 
linist! “Wit,” says Heine, —and the same thing 
is true of beauty, —“‘isolated, is worthless. It is 
only endurable when it rests on a solid basis.” 
In fact, beauty as a separate and distinct thing 
does not exist. Neither can it be reached by any 
sorting or sifting or clarifying process. It is an 
experience of the mind, and must be preceded by 
the conditions, just as light is an experience of the 
eye, and sound of the ear. 
To attempt to manufacture beauty is as vain as 
to attempt to manufacture truth; and to give it us 
in poems or any form of art, without a lion of some 
sort, a lion of truth or fitness or power, is to emas- 
culate it and destroy its volition. 
But current poetry is, for the most part, an at- 
tempt to do this very thing, to give us beauty with- 
out beauty’s antecedents and foil. The poets want 
to spare us the annoyance of the beast. Since 
beauty is the chief attraction, why not have this 
part alone, pure and unadulterated,— why not pluck 
the plumage from the bird, the flower from its stalk, 
the moss from the rock, the shell from the shore, 
the honey-bag from the bee, and thus have in brief 
what pleases us? Hence, with rare exceptions, one 
feels, on opening the latest book of poems, like ex- 
claiming, Well, here is the beautiful at last divested 
of everything else, — of truth, of power, of utility, 
