We always find a poet's outburst of sorrow interesting. The poems of the Hebrews, Persians, Arabians, Chinese and Japanese may be read by us because they voice the sorrows that are universal to man. Grief is the substance of poetry and in the public mind there has always been an association between poetry and sadness; as Shelley said--"our sweetest songs are those that told the saddest thought."

It is assumed that Christianity made poetry sad but this is not so, for there is sad poetry in the Old Testament and among the Romans and the Orientals who never embraced Christianity. Poetry is sad because it is intertwined with human nerves. The most frequent note in poetry is wailing and lamentation, self-pity and passionate rebuke.

In Professor William A. Neilson's _Essentials of Poetry_, there is an interesting chapter on sentimentalism in poetry, in which the author dwells on the sentimentalism in the poetry of the English Romantic School. He defines it as the cultivation of an emotion for the sake of the thrill. Most certainly there can be no great poetry where the sentimentalism is forced, where it becomes ridiculous, where it bubbles over and becomes monotonous. Sentimentalism often characterizes popular poetry and if the public is likely to err in judging poetry it is particularly likely to confuse sentimentalism with normal human emotions. Yet it is hard often to draw the line between sham emotions and genuine sentiment.

The poet is bound to be always sentimental to an extent because he must wear his heart on his sleeve. No one need be ashamed of unadulterated emotions, for life is made up of them.

Besides, nationalities differ. The Irish, the Jews and the Russians, for example, do not consider their own poems sentimental because these are genuine records of actual feelings characteristic of sentimental peoples; to be sure, such expressed emotions may appear as sentimental to the rest of the world. Many think that the emotion of pity, and also sympathy for the criminal that we find in Russian novels is rather sentimental and nauseating, but it is genuine Russian emotion.

We should be on our guard, however, in regarding sentimentalism as poetry. The public loves cheap popular songs and mushy lachrymose verses. The many poems, stories and plays about "mother," "baby," "the flag," "home," "our country," etc., are often driveling sentimentalism and not poetry.

Ecstasy was the keynote of Oriental poetry. We are fortunate in having a translation in the _Journal of the 

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