Plans

"How?" queried the poet. "How?" He had heard the reason a dozen times
before, but he longed to hear it again. He lifted his face from his
hands--an ideal face for a poet; clean-cut, sensitive, with deep-set
eyes, curved lips, and a finely-modelled chin. "How do you know?"

"I feel!" replied the critic simply. "Of course, I am prejudiced in
favour of your work; but that would not make it haunt me as if it were
my own. I can see your faults; you are horribly uneven. There are
lines here and there which make me cold; lines which are put in for the
sake of the rhyme, and nothing more; but there are other bits,"--the
girl's eyes turned towards the window, and gazed dreamily into
space--"which sing in my heart! When it is fine, when it is dark, when
I am glad, when I am in trouble, why do your lines come unconsciously
into my mind, as if they expressed my own feelings better than I can do
it myself? That's not rhyme--that's poetry! It is the real thing; not
pretence."

A glad smile passed over the boy's face; he stretched out his hand
towards the neglected cup, and quaffed coffee and hope in one reviving
draught. "But no one seems to want poetry nowadays!"

"True! I think you may have to wait until you have made a name in the
other direction. Why not try fiction? Your prose is excellent, almost
as good as your verse."