"At my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shak'd like a coward."

--and Hotspur's interpretation (slightly petulant, to be sure), "Why,
so it would have done at the time if your mother's cat had but
kittened, though you yourself had never been born." I protest that I
reverence poetry and the poets: but at the risk of being warned off
the holy ground as a "dark-browed sophist," must declare my plain
opinion that the above account of the poet's birth and native gifts
does not consist with fact.

Yet it consents with the popular notion, which you may find presented
or implied month by month and week by week, in the reviews; and even
day by day--for it has found its way into the newspapers. Critics have
observed that considerable writers fall into two classes--


Two lines of Poetic Development.

(1) Those who start with their heads full of great thoughts, and are
from the first occupied rather with their matter than with the manner
of expressing it.

(2) Those who begin with the love of expression and intent to be
artists in words, _and come through expression to profound thought_.


The Popular Type.