Ionica by Edmund Gosse — Read

IONICA. _Smith Elder & Co., 65, Cornhill_. 1858.

Good poetry seems to be almost as indestructible as diamonds. You throw it out of the window into the roar of London, it disappears in a deep brown slush, the omnibus and the growler pass over it, and by and by it turns up again somewhere uninjured, with all the pure fire lambent in its facets. No doubt thoroughly good specimens of prose do get lost, dragged down the vortex of a change of fashion, and never thrown back again to light. But the quantity of excellent verse produced in any generation is not merely limited, but keeps very fairly within the same proportions. The verse-market is never really glutted, and while popular masses of what Robert Browning calls "deciduous trash" survive their own generation, only to be carted away, the little excellent, unnoticed book gradually pushes its path up silently into fame.