BULLER.
Neither do I believe that the more distinguished Poets generally have been culpably unforethinking—
"Vatis avarus
Non temere est animus!"
I hope so. I should be exceedingly sorry to think that the Bard were apt to give into the most odious of all vices. But the interval is wide from vicious negligence to vicious care: and I hope that somewhere between, and verging from the Golden Mean a little way towards the negligent extreme, might be the proper and earned place of the Poets.
TALBOYS.
We must confess to some negligent tendencies in the Poet. The warm sympathies give advantage to designing beggars of different ranks—and are themselves betraying advisers. The law of the poetical mind to accept Impression, and let it have its way, if it overflow its legitimate channel of poetical study and art, and irregularly lay the conduct of life under water, may leave behind it something else than fertility. The dwelling in pleasure may make the narrow and exact cares of economy irksome. But why shall we expect that a man of high, clear, and strong mind shall not learn how to—cut his coat according to his cloth?
NORTH.
I am afraid that the high faculties of a Poet threaten to endanger his vulgar welfare. The foundation of his poetical being and power, as you well have hinted, Talboys, is the free spontaneity of motion in his own mind—the surrendering of his whole spirit to influxes and self-impulses. The spontaneous movement allies his temperament to common passion, which founds upon this very characteristic. And you sometimes see, accordingly, that the Poet is a victim sacrificed for the benefit of the rest. Not that it need be so—for he has his own means of protection; but powers delicate, sensitive, profound, must walk perilously in a lapsed world.
SEWARD.
Let it be allowed, then, to Dugald, that the poetical temperament is adverse to getting—and to keeping—money—and that a touching picture might be drawn of the conflicts of spirit between a Poet and his false position in a counting-house—or with "poverty's unconquerable bar."