When you find a beach strewed with the shells and other spoils that
belonged once to the deep sea, you know the tide has been there, and that
the winds and waves have wrestled over its naked sands. And so, if I
find a poem stranded in my soul and have nothing to do but seize it as a
wrecker carries off the treasure he finds cast ashore, I know I have paid
at some time for that poem with some inward commotion, were it only an
excess of 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.
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