I can't help it; I
want to have my talk about it, and if I say the same things that writer
did, somebody else can have the satisfaction of saying I stole them all.
[I thought the person whom I have called hypothetically the Man of
Letters changed color a little and betrayed a certain awkward
consciousness that some of us were looking at him or thinking of him; but
I am a little suspicious about him and may do him wrong.]
That poets are treated as privileged persons by their admirers and the
educated public can hardly be disputed. That they consider themselves so
there is no doubt whatever. On the whole, I do not know so easy a way of
shirking all the civic and social and domestic duties, as to settle it in
one's mind that one is a poet. I have, therefore, taken great pains to
advise other persons laboring under the impression that they were gifted
beings, destined to soar in the atmosphere of song above the vulgar
realities of earth, not to neglect any homely duty under the influence of
that impression. The number of these persons is so great that if they
were suffered to indulge their prejudice against every-day duties and
labors, it would be a serious loss to the productive industry of the
country. My skirts are clear (so far as other people are concerned) of
countenancing that form of intellectual opium-eating in which rhyme takes
the place of the narcotic.
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