being; we others are chained by the leg and held fast to our desk."

"Yes; but it is a chain, friend, which ensures you the blessed bread of
existence," answered the poet. "You need feel no care for the coming morrow:
when you are old, you receive a pension."

"True," said the clerk, shrugging his shoulders; "and yet you are the better
off. To sit at one's ease and poetise--that is a pleasure; everybody has
something agreeable to say to you, and you are always your own master. No,
friend, you should but try what it is to sit from one year's end to the other
occupied with and judging the most trivial matters."

The poet shook his head, the copying-clerk did the same. Each one kept to his
own opinion, and so they separated.

"It's a strange race, those poets!" said the clerk, who was very fond of
soliloquizing. "I should like some day, just for a trial, to take such nature
upon me, and be a poet myself; I am very sure I should make no such miserable
verses as the others. Today, methinks, is a most delicious day for a poet.
Nature seems anew to celebrate her awakening into life. The air is so
unusually clear, the clouds sail on so buoyantly, and from the green herbage a
fragrance is exhaled that fills me with delight. For many a year have I not
felt as at this moment."

We see already, by the foregoing effusion, that he is become a poet; to give
further proof of it, however, would in most cases be insipid, for it is a most
foolish notion to fancy a poet different from other men. Among the latter
there may be far more poetical natures than many an acknowledged poet, when
examined more closely, could boast of; the difference only is, that the poet
possesses a better mental memory, on which account he is able to retain the