to the
thorny crown of author. I echo the hard saying of the Maestro: I should
be your worst enemy did I encourage you to forsake a career in which a
dazzling success is so assured, for one in which, if it were your true
vocation, you would not ask whether you were fit for it; you would be
impelled to it by the terrible star which presides over the birth of
poets.

Have you, who are so naturally observant, and of late have become so
reflective, never remarked that authors, however absorbed in their
own craft, do not wish their children to adopt it? The most successful
author is perhaps the last person to whom neophytes should come for
encouragement. This I think is not the case with the cultivators of the
sister arts.

The painter, the sculptor, the musician, seem disposed to invite
disciples and welcome acolytes. As for those engaged in the practical
affairs of life, fathers mostly wish their sons to be as they have been.

The politician, the lawyer, the merchant, each says to his children,
"Follow my steps." All parents in practical life would at least agree
in this,--they would not wish their sons to be poets. There must be some
sound cause in the world's philosophy for this general concurrence of
digression from a road of which the travellers themselves say to those
whom they love best, "Beware!"

Romance in youth is, if rightly understood, the happiest nutriment of
wisdom in after-years; but I would never invite any one to look upon the
romance of youth as a thing

"To case in periods and embalm in ink."

Enfant, have you need of a publisher to create romance? Is it not in
yourself? Do not imagine that genius requires for its enjoyment the
scratch of the pen and the types of the printer. Do not suppose that the
poet, the romancier, is most poetic, most romantic, when he is striving,
struggling, labouring, to check the rush of his ideas, and materialize
the images which visit him as souls into such tangible likenesses of
flesh and blood that the highest compliment a reader can bestow on them
is to say that they are lifelike: No: the poet's real delight is not
in the mechanism of composing; the best part of that delight is in the
sympathies he has established with innumerable modifications of life and
form, and art and Nature, sympathies which are often found equally keen
in those who have not the same gift of language. The poet is but the
interpreter. What of?--Truths in the hearts of others. He utte