explain satisfactorily enough to one's self the domestic
misadventures of men of letters--of poets especially. We know the poets
only in their books; their wives know them out of them. Their wives see
the other side of the moon; and we have been made pretty well aware how
they have appreciated _that_.

The man engaged in the writing of books is tempted to make such writing
the be-all and end-all of his existence--to grow his literature out of
his history, experience, or observation, as the gardener grows out of
soils brought from a distance the plants which he intends to exhibit.
The cup of life foams fiercely over into first books; materials for the
second, third, and fourth must be carefully sought for. The man of
letters, as time passes on, and the professional impulse works deeper,
ceases to regard the world with a single eye. The man slowly merges into
the artist. He values new emotions and experiences, because he can turn
these into artistic shapes. He plucks "copy" from rising and setting
suns. He sees marketable pathos in his friend's death-bed. He carries
the peal of his daughter's marriage-bells into his sentences or his
rhymes; and in these the music sounds sweeter to him than in the sunshine
and the wind. If originally of a meditative, introspective mood, his
profession can hardly fail to confirm and deepen his peculiar
temperament. He begins to feel his own pulse curiously, and for a
purpose. As a spy in the service of literature, he lives in the world
and its concerns. Out of everything he seeks thoughts and images, as out
of everything the bee seeks wax and honey. A curious instance of this
mode of looking at things occurs in Goethe's "Letters from Italy," with
whom, indeed, it was fashion, and who helped himself out of the teeming
world to more effect than any man of his time:--

"From Botzen to Trent the stage is nine leagues, and runs through a
valley which constantly increases in fertility. All that merely
struggles into vegetation on the higher mountains has here more strength
and vitality. The sun shines with warmth, and there is once more belief
in a Deity.

"A poor woman cried out to me to take her child into my vehicle, as the
soil was burning its feet. I did her this service out of honour to the
strong light of Heaven. The child was strangely decked out, _but I could
get nothing from it in any way_."

It is clear that out of all this the reader gains; but I cannot help
think