balance is to have your checks protested. The excesses of youth are
drafts payable at maturity. Chatterton dead at eighteen, Keats at
twenty-six, Shelley at thirty-three, Byron at thirty-six, Poe at forty,
and Burns at thirty-seven, are the rule. When drafts made by the men
mentioned became due, there was no balance to their credit and Charon
beckoned.

Most life-insurance companies now ask the applicant this question, "Do you
write poetry to excess?" Shakespeare, to be sure, clung to life until he
was fifty-three, but this seems to be the limit. Dickens and Thackeray,
their candles well burned out, also died under sixty. Of course, I know
that Browning, Tennyson, Morris and Bryant lived to a fair old age, but
this was on borrowed time, for in the early life of each there was a
hiatus of from ten to eighteen years, when the men never wrote a line, nor
touched a drop of anything, bravely eschewing all honey from Hymettus.
Then the four men last named were all happily married, and married life is
favorable to longevity, but not to poetry. As a rule only single men, or
those unhappily mated, make love and write poetry. Men happily married
make money, cultivate content, and evolve an aldermanic front; but love
and poetry are symptoms of unrest. Thus is Emerson's proposition partially
proven, that in life all things are bought and must be paid for with a
price--even success and happiness.

* * * * *

Burns once explained to Doctor Moore that the first fine, careless rapture
of his song was awakened into being when he was sixteen years old, by "a
bonnie sweet sonsie lass" whom we now know as "Handsome Nell." Her other
name to us is vapor, and history is silent as to her life-pilgrimage.
Whether she lived to realize that she had first given voice to one of the
great singers of earth--of this we are also ignorant. She was one year
younger than Burns, and little more than a child when she and Bobby lagged
behind the troop of tired haymakers, and walked home, hand in hand, in the
gloaming. Here is one of the stanzas addressed to "Handsome Nell":

"She dresses all so clean and neat,
Both decent and genteel,
And then there's something in her gait
Makes any dress look weel."

And how could Nell then ever guess why her cheeks burned scarlet, and why
she was so sorry when haying-time was over? She was sweet, innocent,
artless, and their love was very natural, tender, innocent. It's a