enjoyment, which has used up just so much of my vital capital.
But besides all the impressions that furnished the stuff of the poem,
there has been hard work to get the management of that wonderful
instrument I spoke of,--the great organ, language. An artist who works
in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man
who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized
by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling. I don't know that
you must break any bones in a poet's mechanism before his thought
can dance in rhythm, but read your Milton and see what training, what
patient labor, it took before he could shape our common speech into his
majestic harmonies.

It is rather singular, but the same kind of thing has happened to me not
very rarely before, as I suppose it has to most persons, that just when
I happened to be thinking about poets and their conditions, this very
morning, I saw a paragraph or two from a foreign paper which is apt to
be sharp, if not cynical, relating to the same matter. I can't help
it; I want to have my talk about it, and if I say the same things that
writer did, somebody else can have the satisfaction of saying I stole
them all.

[I thought the person whom I have called hypothetically the Man
of Letters changed color a little and betrayed a certain awkward
consciousness that some of us were looking at him or thinking of him;
but I am a little suspicious about him and may do him wrong.]

That poets are treated as privileged persons by their admirers and the
educated public can hardly be disputed. That they consider themselves so
there is no doubt whatever. On the whole, I do not know so easy a way of
shirking all the civic and social and domestic duties, as to settle it
in one's mind that one is a poet. I have, therefore, taken great pains
to advise other persons laboring under the impression that they were
gifted beings, destined to soar in the atmosphere of song above the
vulgar realities of earth, not to neglect any homely duty under the
influence of that impression. The number of these persons is so great
that if they were suffered to indulge their prejudice against every-day
duties and labors, it would be a serious loss to the productive
industry of the country. My skirts are clear (so far as other people are
concerned) of countenancing that form of intellectual opium-eating in
which rhyme takes the place of the narcotic. But what are you going