From his twenty-third year his days were passed in sinning and repenting.

Poetry and love-making should be carried on with caution: they form a
terrific tax on life's forces. Most poets die young, not because the gods
especially love them, but because life is a bank-account, and to wipe out
your 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.

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