"True, I am a verse-maker," he resumed, "but my verse is no more
than the material body into which I breathe the celestial soul of
thought. Alas! how many a pang has it cost me, this same
insensibility to the ethereal essence of poetry, with which you
have here tortured me again, at the moment when I am to
relinquish my profession forever! O Fate! why hast thou warred
with Nature, turning all her higher and more perfect gifts to the
ruin of me, their possessor? What is the voice of song, when the
world lacks the ear of taste? How can I rejoice in my strength
and delicacy of feeling, when they have but made great sorrows
out of little ones? Have I dreaded scorn like death, and yearned
for fame as others pant for vital air, only to find myself in a
middle state between obscurity and infamy? But I have my revenge!
I could have given existence to a thousand bright creations. I
crush them into my heart, and there let them putrefy! I shake off
the dust of my feet against my countrymen! But posterity, tracing
my footsteps up this weary hill, will cry shame upon the unworthy
age that drove one of the fathers of American song to end his
days in a Shaker village! "

During this harangue, the speaker gesticulated with great energy,
and, as poetry is the natural language of passion, there appeared
reason to apprehend his final explosion into an ode extempore.
The reader must understand that, for all these bitter words, he
was a kind, gentle, harmless, poor fellow enough, whom Nature,
tossing her ingredients together without looking at her recipe,
had sent into the world with too much of one sort of brain, and
hardly any of another.