forged and fashioned amid misery and pain in the
sordid squalor of the city garret. There, from their eyries, while the
world heaved and throbbed below, the kings of men sent forth their
eagle thoughts to wing their flight through the ages. There, where the
sunlight streaming through the broken panes fell on rotting boards and
crumbling walls; there, from their lofty thrones, those rag-clothed
Joves have hurled their thunderbolts and shaken, before now, the earth
to its foundations.

Huddle them up in your lumber-rooms, oh, world! Shut them fast in and
turn the key of poverty upon them. Weld close the bars, and let them
fret their hero lives away within the narrow cage. Leave them there to
starve, and rot, and die. Laugh at the frenzied beatings of their hands
against the door. Roll onward in your dust and noise and pass them by,
forgotten.

But take care lest they turn and sting you. All do not, like the fabled
phoenix, warble sweet melodies in their agony; sometimes they spit
venom--venom you must breathe whether you will or no, for you cannot
seal their mouths, though you may fetter their limbs. You can lock the
door upon them, but they burst open their shaky lattices and call
out over the house-tops so that men cannot but hear. You hounded wild
Rousseau into the meanest garret of the Rue St. Jacques and jeered at
his angry shrieks. But the thin, piping tones swelled a hundred years
later into the sullen roar of the French Revolution, and civilization to
this day is quivering to the reverberations of his voice.

As for myself, however, I like an attic. Not to live in: as residences
they are inconvenient. There is too much getting up and down stairs
connected with them to please me. It puts one unpleasantly in mind of
the tread-mill. The form of the ceiling offers too many facilities for
bumping your head and too few for shaving. And the note of the tomcat
as he sings to his love in the stilly night outside on the tiles becomes
positively distasteful when heard so near.

No, for living in give me a suit of rooms on the first floor of a
Piccadilly mansion (I wish somebody would!); but for thinking in let
me have an attic up ten flights of stairs in the densest quarter of the
city. I have all Herr Teufelsdrockh's affection for attics. There is a
sublimity about their loftiness. I love to "sit at ease and look down
upon the wasps' nest beneath;" to listen to the dull murmur of the human
tide ebbing and flowing ceasel