le. Poetry is but a
preparation of opium distilled by a minority for a minority. The poet may
test the case by the relative amounts he pays his butcher and his
bookseller. So far as I know, he pays as little for his poetry as
possible, and never buys a volume by a brother-singer till he has vainly
tried six different ways to get a presentation copy. The poet seems
incapable of mastering the rudimentary truth that ethereals must be based
on materials. 'No song, no supper' is the old saw. It is equally true
reversed--no supper, no song. The empty-stomach theory of creation is a
cruel fallacy, though undoubtedly hunger has sometimes been the spur which
the clear soul doth raise.

The conditions of existence compel the publisher to be a tradesman on the
same material basis as any other. Ideally, a poem, like any other
beautiful thing, is beyond price; but, practically, its value depends on
the number of individuals who can be prevailed upon to purchase it. In its
ethereal--otherwise its unprinted--state, it is only subject to the laws
of the celestial ether, one of which is that it yields no money; properly
speaking, money is there an irrelevant condition. Byron, you remember,
would not for a long time accept any money from Murray for his poems,
successful as they were. He had a proper sense of the indignity of
_selling_ the children of his soul. The incongruity is much as though we
might go to Portland Road and buy an angel, just as we buy a parrot. The
transactions of poetry and of sale are on two different planes. But so
soon as, shall we say, you debase poetry by bringing it down to the lower
plane, it becomes subject to the laws of that plane. An unprinted poem is
a spiritual thing, but a printed poem is subject to the laws of matter. In
the heaven of the poet's imagination there are no printers and
paper-makers, no binders, no discounts to the trade and thirteen to the
dozen; but on earth, where alone, so far as we know, books exist, these
terrestrial beings and conditions are of paramount importance, and cannot
be ignored. It may be perfectly true that a certain poem is so fine that,
in a properly constituted cosmogony, it ought to support you to the end of
your days; but is the publisher to blame because, in spite of its manifest
genius, he can sell no more than 500 copies?

Then, to take another point of view, it is, I think, quite demonstrable
that, compared with the men of many other callings, a poet who can get