There is a fountain filled with blood

expresses the home-sickness of the spirit as yearningly as

  And now my heart with pleasure fills
  And dances with the daffodils.

There are many details on which one would like to join issue with Sir Henry Newbolt, but his main contentions are so suggestive, his sympathies so catholic and generous, that it seems hardly worth while arguing with him about questions of scansion or of the relation of Blake to contemporary politics, or of the evil of anthologies.  His book is the reply of a capable and honest man of letters to the challenge uttered to poets by Keats in The Fall of Hyperion, where Moneta demands: 

  What benfits canst thou, or all thy tribe
  To the great world?

and declares: 

  None can usurp this height ... 
  But those to whom the miseries of the world
  Are misery, and will not let them rest.

Sir Henry Newbolt, like Sir Sidney Colvin, no doubt, would hold that here Keats dismisses too slightingly his own best work.  But how noble is Keats’s dissatisfaction with himself!  It is such noble dissatisfaction as this that distinguishes the great poets from the amateurs.  Poetry and religion—­the impulse is very much the same.  The rest is but a parlour-game.

IX.—­EDWARD YOUNG AS CRITIC

So little is Edward Young read in these days that we have almost forgotten how wide was his influence in the eighteenth century.  It was not merely that he was popular in England, where his satires, The Love of Fame, the Universal Passion, are said to have made him L3,000.  He was also a power on the Continent.  His Night Thoughts was translated not only into all the major languages, but into Portuguese, Swedish and Magyar.  It was adopted as one of the heralds of the romantic movement in France.  Even his Conjectures on Original Composition, written in 1759 in the form of a letter to Samuel Richardson, earned in foreign countries a fame that has lasted till our own day.  A new edition of the German translation was published at Bonn so recently as 1910.  In England there is no famous author more assiduously neglected.  Not so much as a line is quoted from him in The Oxford Book of English Verse.  I recently turned up a fairly full anthology of eighteenth-century verse only to find that though it has room for Mallet and Ambrose Phillips and Picken, Young has not been allowed to contribute a purple patch even five lines long.  I look round my own shelves, and they tell the same story.  Small enough poets stand there in shivering neglect.  Akenside, Churchill and Parnell have all been thought worth keeping.  But not on the coldest, topmost shelf has space been found for Young.  He scarcely survives even in popular quotations.  The copy-books have perpetuated one line: 

  Procrastination is the thief of time.