What is the matter with you?—How can you be so blind? There are some of you who really love books—look and see the story of genius—if it be not a thing to make you shudder and turn sick. It has been so through all the ages, and it will be so through all the ages to come, until society has a conscience and a soul. Tell me if there is anything in this world more frightful than the lot of the poets who have been born poor—of Marlowe and Chatterton and Goldsmith, Johnson and Burns and Keats! And who can tell how many were choked before even their first utterance?
I can not talk of that, for it makes me sick; but I will talk of the poets who were born rich. Is it not singular—is it not terrible—how many of the great stalwart ones were rich? To be educated, to own books, to hear music, to dwell in the country, to be free from men and men's judgments! Oh, the words break my heart!
—But was not Goethe rich, and did he not have these things? And was not Hugo rich? And Milton? When he left college he spent five years at his father's country place and wrote four poems that have done more to make men happy than if they had cost many millions of dollars.
But let me come to what I spoke of before, the seven poets of this century in England.
I name Wordsworth and Byron, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne, Shelley and Keats. I said that six of them were independent, and that the other—the greatest—died like a dog.