now. I grew up in the
country--had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and
poetry, and my experience in reveries. My sympathies drooped towards
the ground like an untrained honeysuckle--and but for _one_, in my own
house--but of this I cannot speak. It was a lonely life, growing green
like the grass around it. Books and dreams were what I lived in--and
domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about
the grass. And so time passed, and passed--and afterwards, when my
illness came and I seemed to stand at the edge of the world with all
done, and no prospect (as appeared at one time) of ever passing the
threshold of one room again; why then, I turned to thinking with some
bitterness (after the greatest sorrow of my life had given me room and
time to breathe) that I had stood blind in this temple I was about to
leave--that I had seen no Human nature, that my brothers and sisters
of the earth were _names_ to me, that I had beheld no great mountain
or river, nothing in fact. I was as a man dying who had not read
Shakespeare, and it was too late! do you understand? And do you also
know what a disadvantage this ignorance is to my art? Why, if I live
on and yet do not escape from this seclusion, do you not perceive that
I labour under signal disadvantages--that I am, in a manner, as a
_blind poet_? Certainly, there is a compensation to a degree. I have
had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness
and self-analysis, I make great guesses at Human nature in the main.
But how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering,
ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life
and man, for some....

But all grumbling is a vile thing. We should all thank God for our
measures of life, and think them enough for each of us. I write so,
that you may not mistake what I wrote before in relation to society,
although you do not see from my point of view; and that you may
understand what I mean fully when I say, that I have lived all my
chief _joys_, and indeed nearly all emotions that go warmly by that
name and relate to myself personally, in poetry and in poetry alone.
Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I
write--it is life, for me. Why, what is to live? Not to eat and drink
and breathe,--but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of
being, passionately and joyfully. And thus, one lives in composition
surely--not always--but wh