making its pulse beat faster.  But Keats and Shelley worked on in discouragement and obscurity.  It is true that they judged their own work justly, and knew within themselves that there was a fiery quality in what they wrote.  But how many poets have fed themselves in vain on the same hopes, have thought themselves unduly contemned and slighted!  There is hardly a scribbler of verse who has not the same delusion, and who has not in chilly and comfortless moments to face the fact that he does not probably count for very much, after all, in the scheme of things.  How hard it is in the case of Keats and Shelley to feel that they had not some inkling of all the desirous worship, the generous praise, that has surrounded their memory after their death!  How hard it is to enter into the bitterness of spirit which fell upon Shelley, not once nor twice, at the acrid contempt of reviewers!  How hard it is to put oneself inside the crushing sense of failure that haunted Keats’ last days, with death staring him in the face!  Of course, one may say that a writer ought not to depend upon any consciousness of fame; that he ought to make his work as good as he can, and not care about the verdict.  That is a fine and dignified philosophy; but at the same time half of the essence of the writer’s work lies in its appeal.  He may feel the beauty of the world with a poignant emotion; but his work is to make others feel it too, and it is impossible that he should not be profoundly discouraged if there is no one who heeds his voice.  It is not that he craves for stupid and conventional praise from men who can only applaud when they see others applauding.  What he desires is to express the kinship, the enthusiasm of generous hearts, to make an echo in the souls of a few like-minded people.  He may desire this—­nay, he must desire it, if he is to fulfil his own ideal at all.  For in the minds of poets there is the hope of achievement, of creation; he dedicates time and thought and endeavour to his work, and the test of its fineness and of its worth is that it should move others.  If a man cannot have some faint hope that he is doing this, then he had better sink back into the crowd, live the life of the world, earn a wage, make a place for himself.  Indeed, he has no justification for refusing to shoulder the accustomed burden, unless he is sure that the task to which he devotes himself is better worth the doing; a poet must always be haunted by the suspicion that he is but pleasing himself and playing indolently at a pretty game, unless he can believe that he is adding something to the sum of beauty and truth.  These visions of the poet are very faint and delicate things; there is little of robust confidence about them, while there are plenty of loud and insistent voices on every side of him to tell him that he is shirking the work of the world, and that he is not lifting a finger in the cause of humanity and progress.  There are some self-conscious artists who would say that the cause of humanity and progress is not the concern of the artist at all; but, on the other hand, you will find but few of the great artists of the ages who have not been thrilled and haunted with the deep desire to help others, to increase their peace and joy, to interpret the riddle of the world, to give a motive for living a fuller life than the life of the drudge and the raker of stones and dirt.