beauty, and are satisfied if they give us pretty sentiment
or musical verses. We come to them disinterestedly.
Perhaps we do not quite, with Carlyle, make our claim a
zero and get infinity for our quotient. But when we get
pleasure, the pleasure is gain.

The selection reveals, too, a phase of Greene as a man.
It shows the more tender, graceful side of his nature. There
is nothing garish about it. Greene's taste in discrimination
between the fanciful and the ultra-fanciful was not always
sure. His fondness for fine clothes and his manner of wear-
ing his beard are characteristics which appear in his writings.
There is manifested a feeling for the artistic; at the same
time, there is no limit before which to stop. If he is writing
a romance, he has it romantic to excess; a didactic pamphlet,
he forces ideas upon us at every turn. In his poetry, taken
altogether, the same defect is present. But with the poetry
--something which is impossible with the prose works--
we can cut away the parts which are bad, and leave that
which is good discernible and clear. Reduced thus to
minute compass, sublimated, what is either dull or fan-
tastic in the mass becomes pure and undefiled. It can be
recognized as the product of a genuinely artistic imagination.

Greene has not the honor of a place in the Golden Treasury.

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