(or a centurion)
Already they flee, howling in terror
* * * * *
Will they be touched with the verisimilitude?
Their virgin stupidity is untemptable.

He adds,

I beg you, my friendly critics,
Do not set about to procure me an audience.

Again he instructs his poems, when they meet the public,

Salute them with your thumbs to your noses.

It is very curious, after such passages, to find him pleading, in
another poem,

May my poems be printed this week?

The naivete of this last question brings up insistently a perplexing
problem. If the poet despises his readers, why does he write? He may
perhaps evade this question by protesting, with Tennyson,

I pipe but as the linnets do,
And sing because I must.

But why does he publish? If he were strictly logical, surely he would do
as the artist in Browning's _Pictor Ignotus,_ who so shrank from
having his pictures come into contact with fools, that he painted upon