"Alas! I resign that fancy," said the minstrel, with another
half-sigh. "It was not indeed wholly, but in great part the hope
of the poet's fame that made me a truant in the way to that which
destiny, and such few gifts as Nature conceded to me, marked
out for my proper and only goal. But what a strange, delusive
Will-o'-the-Wisp the love of verse-making is! How rarely a man of
good sense deceives himself as to other things for which he is fitted,
in which he can succeed; but let him once drink into his being the
charm of verse-making, how the glamour of the charm bewitches his
understanding! how long it is before he can believe that the world
will not take his word for it, when he cries out to sun, moon, and
stars, 'I, too, am a poet.' And with what agonies, as if at the wrench
of soul from life, he resigns himself at last to the conviction that
whether he or the world be right, it comes to the same thing. Who can
plead his cause before a court that will not give him a hearing?"

It was with an emotion so passionately strong, and so intensely
painful, that the owner of the dog with the begging-tray thus spoke,
that Kenelm felt, through sympathy, as if he himself were torn asunder
by the wrench of life from soul. But then Kenelm was a mortal so
eccentric that, if a single acute suffering endured by a fellow mortal
could be brought before the evidence of his senses, I doubt whether he
would not have suffered as much as that fellow-mortal. So that,
though if there were a thing in the world which Kenelm Chillingly
would care not to do, it was verse-making, his mind involuntarily
hastened to the arguments by which he could best mitigate the pang of
the verse-maker.

Quoth he: "According to my very scanty reading, you share the love of
verse-making with men the most illustrious in careers which have