en, my boy, and he amounted to nothing at all as a
poet. A poet--my stars!"

"I thought that you looked upon Uncle Ben as the best man in all the
world. The people love him. When he enters the Old South Church there is
silence."

"That is all very true, my boy, but he lives between the heavens and
the earth, and can not get up to the one or down to the other. Poets are
beggars, in some way or other. They live in garrets among the mice and
bats. Their country is the imagination, and that is the next door to
nowhere. You a poet! What puckers my face up--_so_?"

"But my poetry sells, father," looking into his father's droll face, his
heart sinking.

"Your poetry! It sells, my boy, because you are a little shaver and
appear to be smart, and also because your rhymes refer to events in
which everybody is interested. But, my son, your poetry, as you call it,
has no merit in itself. It is full of all kinds of errors. It is style
that makes a poem live; yours has no style."

"But, father, many people do not think so."

"But they will. You will think so some day."

"But isn't there something good in it?"

"Nothing, Ben. You never was born to be a poet. You have the ability to
earn a living, same as I have done. Poets don't have that kind of
ability; they beg. There are not many men who can earn a living by
selling their fancies, which is mostly moonshine."

This was unsympathetic. Ben looked at the soap kettles and candle molds
and wondered if these things had not blinded his father's poetic
perceptions. There was no Vale of Tempe here.

But Josiah Franklin had hard common sense. Little Ben's dreams of poetic
fame came down from the skies at one arrow. That was a bitter hour.

"If I can not be a poet," he thought, "I can still be useful," and he
reverted from heroic ballads to stern old Cotton Mather's Essays to do
Good. The fated poet is always left a like resource.

Yet many people who have not become poets, but who have risen to be
eminent men, have had poetic dreams in early life; they have had the
poetic mind. A little poetry in one's composition is no common gift; it
is a stamp of superiority in some direction. Josiah Franklin was a wise
man, but his views of poetry as such were of a low standard. Poetry is
the highest expression of life, the noblest exercise of the spiritual
faculties.

So poor little Ben had soared to be laughed at again. But there was
something out of the common stirring in him, and he wo