successful as they were. He had a proper sense of the indignity of
_selling_ the children of his soul. The incongruity is much as though we
might go to Portland Road and buy an angel, just as we buy a parrot. The
transactions of poetry and of sale are on two different planes. But so
soon as, shall we say, you debase poetry by bringing it down to the lower
plane, it becomes subject to the laws of that plane. An unprinted poem is
a spiritual thing, but a printed poem is subject to the laws of matter. In
the heaven of the poet's imagination there are no printers and
paper-makers, no binders, no discounts to the trade and thirteen to the
dozen; but on earth, where alone, so far as we know, books exist, these
terrestrial beings and conditions are of paramount importance, and cannot
be ignored. It may be perfectly true that a certain poem is so fine that,
in a properly constituted cosmogony, it ought to support you to the end of
your days; but is the publisher to blame because, in spite of its manifest
genius, he can sell no more than 500 copies?

Then, to take another point of view, it is, I think, quite demonstrable
that, compared with the men of many other callings, a poet who can get his
verses accepted is very well paid. Take a typical instance. You spend an
absolutely beatific evening with Clarinda in the moonlit woodland. You go
home and relieve your emotions in a sonnet, which, we will say, at a
generous allowance, takes you half an hour to write. Next morning in that
cold calculating mood for which no business man can match a poet, you copy
it out fair and send it to a friendly editor. Perhaps out of Clarinda
alone you beget a sonnet a week, which at £2, 2s. a week is £109, 4s. a
year--not to speak of Phyllis and Dulcinea. At any rate, take that one
sonnet. For an evening with Clarinda, for which alone you would have paid
the sum, and for a beggarly half-hour's work, you receive as much as many
a City clerk earns by six hard days' work, eight hours to the dreary day,
with perhaps a family to keep and a railway contract to pay for.