whom they love best, "Beware!"

Romance in youth is, if rightly understood, the happiest nutriment of
wisdom in after-years; but I would never invite any one to look upon the
romance of youth as a thing

"To case in periods and embalm in ink."

Enfant, have you need of a publisher to create romance? Is it not in
yourself? Do not imagine that genius requires for its enjoyment the
scratch of the pen and the types of the printer. Do not suppose that the
poet, the romancier, is most poetic, most romantic, when he is striving,
struggling, labouring, to check the rush of his ideas, and materialize
the images which visit him as souls into such tangible likenesses of
flesh and blood that the highest compliment a reader can bestow on them
is to say that they are lifelike: No: the poet's real delight is not in
the mechanism of composing; the best part of that delight is in the
sympathies he has established with innumerable modifications of life and
form, and art and Nature, sympathies which are often found equally keen
in those who have not the same gift of language. The poet is but the
interpreter. What of?--Truths in the hearts of others. He utters what
they feel. Is the joy in the utterance? Nay, it is in the feeling
itself. So, my dear, dark-bright child of song, when I bade thee open,
out of the beaten thoroughfare, paths into the meads and river-banks at
either side of the formal hedgerows, rightly dost thou add that I
enjoined thee to make thine art thy companion. In the culture of that
art for which you are so eminently gifted, you will find the ideal life
ever beside the real. Are you not ashamed to tell me that in that art
you do but utter the thoughts of others? You utter them in music;
through the music you not only give to the thoughts a new character, but