given to my thoughts, and
what thrice-washed whiteness to my words, had I been fed on women's
praises! I should have grown like Marvell's fawn,--

"Lilies without; roses within!"

But then,--he added,--we all think, IF so and so, we should have
been this or that, as you were saying the other day, in those
rhymes of yours.

--I don't think there are many poets in the sense of creators; but
of those sensitive natures which reflect themselves naturally in
soft and melodious words, pleading for sympathy with their joys and
sorrows, every literature is full. Nature carves with her own
hands the brain which holds the creative imagination, but she casts
the over-sensitive creatures in scores from the same mould.

There are two kinds of poets, just as there are two kinds of
blondes. [Movement of curiosity among our ladies at table.--Please
to tell us about those blondes, said the schoolmistress.] Why,
there are blondes who are such simply by deficiency of coloring
matter,--NEGATIVE or WASHED blondes, arrested by Nature on the way
to become albinesses. There are others that are shot through with
golden light, with tawny or fulvous tinges in various degree,
--POSITIVE or STAINED blondes, dipped in yellow sunbeams, and as
unlike in their mode of being to the others as an orange is unlike
a snowball. The albino-style carries with it a wide pupil and a
sensitive retina. The other, or the leonine blonde, has an opaline
fire in her clear eye, which the brunette can hardly match with her
quick glittering glances.

Just so we have the great sun-kindled, constructive imaginations,
and a far more numerous class of poets who have a certain kind of
moonlight-genius given them to compensate for their imperfection of
nature. Their want of mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive
to those impressions which stronger minds neglect or never feel at
all. Many of them die young, and all of them are tinged with
melancholy. There is no more beautiful illustration of the
principle of compensation which marks the Divine benevolence than
the fact that some of the holiest lives and some of the sweetest
songs are the growth of the infirmity which unfits its subject for
the rougher duties of life. When one reads the life of Cowper, or
of Keats, or of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson,--of so many gentle,
sweet natures, born to weakness, and mostly dying before their
time,--one cannot help thinking that the human race dies out
singing, li