monotonous days and sleepless nights--its sickness and heart-loneliness,
has given me opportunities for analysing my past history which were
impossible then, amid the ceaseless in-rush of new images, the ceaseless
ferment of their re-combination, in which my life was passed from sixteen
to twenty-five. The poet, I suppose, must be a seer as long as he is a
worker, and a seer only. He has no time to philosophize--to "think about
thinking," as Goethe, I have somewhere read, says that he never could do.
It is too often only in sickness and prostration and sheer despair, that
the fierce veracity and swift digestion of his soul can cease, and give him
time to know himself and God's dealings with him; and for that reason it is
good for him, too, to have been afflicted.

I do not write all this to boast of it; I am ready to bear sneers at my
romance--my day-dreams--my unpractical habits of mind, for I know that I
deserve them. But such was the appointed growth of my uneducated mind; no
more unhealthy a growth, if I am to believe books, than that of many a
carefully trained one. Highborn geniuses, they tell me, have their idle
visions as well as we working-men; and Oxford has seen of late years as
wild Icarias conceived as ever were fathered by a red Republic. For,
indeed, we have the same flesh and blood, the same God to teach us, the
same devil to mislead us, whether we choose to believe it or not. But there
were excuses for me. We Londoners are not accustomed from our youth to the
poems of a great democratic genius, as the Scotchmen are to their glorious
Burns. We have no chance of such an early acquaintance with poetic art
as that which enabled John Bethune, one of the great unrepresented--the
starving Scotch day-labourer, breaking stones upon the parish roads, to
write at the age of seventeen such words as these:--

Hail, hallow'd evening! sacred hour to me!
Thy clouds of grey, thy vocal melody,