Mr. Browning is aware that one is a poet at his own risk; and that the poetic chaplet may also prove a sacrificial one. He will still wear it, however, because in his case it means the suffrage of a "patron friend"[[18]]
"Whose great verse blares unintermittent on
Like your own trumpeter at Marathon,—" (vol. i. p. 169.)
He recalls his readers to the "business" of the poem:
"the fate of such
As find our common nature—overmuch
Despised because restricted and unfit
To bear the burthen they impose on it—
Cling when they would discard it; craving strength
To leap from the allotted world, at length