re love is not real, but acted,
You must always portend you 're insane,
Or at laste that you 're partly distracted.

Tol lol de lol, etc.'"

It is very unlikely that the reader will estimate Billy's impromptu as
did the company; in fact, it possessed the greatest of all claims to
their admiration, for it was partly incomprehensible, and by the
artful introduction of a word here and there, of which his hearers knew
nothing, the poet was well aware that he was securing their heartiest
approval. Nor was Billy insensible to such flatteries. The _irritabile
genus_ has its soft side, and can enjoy to the uttermost its own
successes. It is possible, if Billy had been in another sphere, with
much higher gifts, and surrounded by higher associates, that he might
have accepted the homage tendered him with more graceful modesty, and
seemed at least less confident of his own merits; but under no possible
change of places or people could the praise have bestowed more sincere
pleasure.

"You're right, there, Jim Morris," said he, turning suddenly round
towards one of the company; "you never said a truer thing than that.
The poetic temperament is riches to a poor man. Wherever I go--in all
weathers, wet and dreary, and maybe footsore, with the bags full, and
the mountain streams all flowin' over--I can just go into my own mind,
just the way you'd go into an inn, and order whatever you wanted. I
don't need to be a king, to sit on a throne; I don't want ships,
nor coaches, nor horses, to convay me to foreign lands. I can bestow
kingdoms. When I haven't tuppence to buy tobacco, and without a shoe to
my foot, and my hair through my hat, I can be dancin' wid princesses,
and handin' empresses in to tay."

"Musha, musha!" muttered the surrounders, as though they were listening
to a magician, who in a moment of unguarded familiarity condescended to
discuss his own miraculous gifts.

"And," resumed Billy, "it isn't only what ye are to yourself and your
own heart, but what ye are to others, that without that sacret bond
between you, wouldn't think of you at all. I remember, once on a time, I
was in the north of England travelling, partly for pleasure, and partly
with a view to a small speculation in Sheffield ware--cheap penknives
and scissors, pencil-cases, bodkins, and the like--and I wandered about
for weeks through what they call the Lake Country, a very handsome
place, but nowise grand or sublime, like what we have