The echo club Author:Bayard Taylor Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NIGHT THE SECOND. JTIE friends came together again in fhc Lions' Uen, a little earlier than their wont; lmt they did not immediately take up tlie chief divers... more »ion of the evening. In intellectual, as in physical acrobaties, the joints must be gradually made flexible, and the muscles warm and elastic, by lighter feats; so the conversation began as mere skylarking and mutual chaffing, as empty and evanescent, when you attempt to catch it, as the foam-ripples on a swift stream. But Galahad had something on his mind ; be had again read portions of the "Earthly Paradise," and insisted that the atmosphere of the poems was not gray and overeast, but charged with a golden, luminous mist, like that of the Indian summer. Finally, be asked the Aneient,— " Granting the foree of your impression, might not much of it come from some want of harmony between your mood or temper of mind and the author's ? In that case, it would not be abstractly just." The Ancient. I don't think that we often can be "abstractly just" towards contemporary poets; we either exalt or abase them too much. For we and they breathe either the same or opposite currents in the intellectual atmosphere of the time, and there can be no impartial estimate until those winds have blown over. This is precisely the reason why you sometimes think me indifferent, when I am only trying to shove myself as far off as the next generation; at least, to get a little outside of the fashions and whims and prejndices of this day. American authors, and also their publishers, are often charged with an over-coneern for the opinion of the English literary journals. I think their interest quite natural— '/mi.vs (with energy). Now, you surely are not going to justify that sycophantic respect for the judgment of men who know so much less th...« less