be a profession in itself--to make a business of an art is to degrade it.
Literature should be the spontaneous output of the mind that has known and
felt. To work the mine of spirit as a business and sift its product for
hire, is to overwork the vein and palm off slag for sterling metal.
Shakespeare was a theater-manager, Milton a secretary, Bobby Burns a
farmer, Lamb a bookkeeper, Wordsworth a government employee, Emerson a
lecturer, Hawthorne a custom-house inspector, and Whitman a clerk. William
Morris was a workingman and a manufacturer, and would have been Poet
Laureate of England had he been willing to call himself a student of
sociology instead of a socialist. Socialism itself (whatever it may be) is
not offensive--the word is.

* * * * *

The great American Apostle of Negation expressed, once upon a day, a
regret that he had not been consulted when the Universe was being planned,
otherwise he would have arranged to make good things catching instead of
bad.

The remark tokened a slight lesion in the logic of the Apostle, for good
things are now, and ever have been, infectious.

Once upon a day, I met a young man who told me that he was exposed at
Kelmscott House for a brief hour, and caught it, and ever after there were
in his mind, thoughts, feelings, emotions and ideals that had not been
there before. Possibly the psychologist would explain that the spores of
all these things were simply sleeping, awaiting the warmth and sunshine of
some peculiar presence to start them into being; but of that I can not
speak--this only I know, that the young man said to me, "Whereas I was
once blind, I now see."