rhymes of yours.
- I don't think there are many poets in the sense of creators; but

of those sensitive natures which reflect themselves naturally in
soft and melodious words, pleading for sympathy with their joys and

sorrows, every literature is full. Nature carves with her own
hands the brain which holds the creativeimagination, but she casts

the over-sensitive creatures in scores from the same mould.
There are two kinds of poets, just as there are two kinds of

blondes. [Movement of curiosity among our ladies at table. -
Please to tell us about those blondes, said the schoolmistress.]

Why, there are blondes who are such simply by deficiency of
coloring matter, - NEGATIVE or WASHED blondes, arrested by Nature

on the way to become albinesses. There are others that are shot
through with golden light, with tawny or fulvous tinges in various

degree, - POSITIVE or STAINED blondes, dipped in yellow sunbeams,
and as unlike in their mode of being to the others as an orange is

unlike a snowball. The albino-style carries with it a wide pupil
and a sensitive retina. The other, or the leonine blonde, has an

opaline fire in her clear eye, which the brunette can hardly match
with her quick glittering glances.

Just so we have the great sun-kindled, constructiveimaginations,
and a far more numerous class of poets who have a certain kind of

moonlight-genius given them to compensate for their imperfection of
nature. Their want of mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive

to those impressions which stronger minds neglect or never feel at
all. Many of them die young, and all of them are tinged with

melancholy. There is no more beautiful illustration of the
principle of compensation which marks the Divine benevolence than

the fact that some of the holiest lives and some of the sweetest
songs are the growth of the infirmity which unfits its subject for

the rougher duties of life. When one reads the life of Cowper, or
of Keats, or of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson, - of so many

gentle, sweet natures, born to weakness, and mostly dying before
their time, - one cannot help thinking that the human race dies out

singing, like the swan in the old story. The French poet, Gilbert,
who died at the Hotel Dieu, at the age of twenty-nine, - (killed by

a key in his throat, which he had swallowed when delirious in
consequence of a fall,) - this poor fellow was a very good example

of the poet by excess of sensibility. I found, the other day, that
some of my literary friends had never heard of him, though I

suppose few educated Frenchmen do not know the lines which he
wrote, a week before his death, upon a mean bed in the great

hospital of Paris.
"Au banquet de la vie, infortune convive,

J'apparus un jour, et je meurs;
Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, ou lentement j'arrive,

Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs."
At life's gay banquet placed, a poor unhappy guest,

One day I pass, then disappear;
I die, and on the tomb where I at length shall rest

No friend shall come to shed a tear.
You remember the same thing in other words some where in Kirke

White's poems. It is the burden of the plaintive songs of all
these sweet albino-poets. "I shall die and be forgotten, and the

world will go on just as if I had never been; - and yet how I have
loved! how I have longed! how I have aspired!" And so singing,

their eyes grow brighter and brighter, and their features thinner
and thinner, until at last the veil of flesh is threadbare, and,

still singing, they drop it and pass onward.
- Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them

up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the
hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

Tic-tac! tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; our will cannot stop
them; they cannot stop themselves, sleep cannot still them; madness

only makes them go faster; death alone can break into the case,
and, seizing the ever-swinging pendulum, which we call the heart,

silence at last the clicking of the terrible escapement we have
carried so long beneath our wrinkled foreheads.

If we could only get at them, as we lie on our pillows and count
the dead beats of thought after thought and image after image

jarring through the overtired organ! Will nobody block those
wheels, uncouple that pinion, cut the string that holds those

weights, blow up the infernal machine with gunpowder? What a
passion comes over us sometimes for silence and rest! - that this

dreadful mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of time,
embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could have but

one brief holiday! Who can wonder that men swing themselves off
from beams in hempen lassos? - that they jump off from parapets

into the swift and gurgling waters beneath? - that they take
counsel of the grim friend who has but to utter his one peremptory

monosyllable and the restless machine is shivered as a vase that is
dashed upon a marble floor? Under that building which we pass

every day there are strong dungeons, where neither hook, nor bar,
nor bed-cord, nor drinking-vessel from which a sharp fragment may

be shattered, shall by any chance be seen. There is nothing for
it, when the brain is on fire with the whirling of its wheels, but

to spring against the stone wall and silence them with one crash.
Ah, they remembered that, - the kind city fathers, - and the walls

are nicely padded, so that one can take such exercise as he likes
without damaging himself on the very plain and serviceable

upholstery. If anybody would only contrive some kind of a lever
that one could thrust in among the works of this horrid automaton

and check them, or alter their rate of going, what would the world
give for the discovery?

- From half a dime to a dime, according to the style of the place
and the quality of the liquor, - said the young fellow whom they

call John.
You speak trivially, but not unwisely, - I said. Unless the will

maintain a certain control over these movements, which it cannot
stop, but can to some extentregulate, men are very apt to try to

get at the machine by some indirectsystem of leverage or other.
They clap on the brakes by means of opium; they change the

maddening monotony of the rhythm by means of fermented liquors. It
is because the brain is locked up and we cannot touch its movement

directly, that we thrust these coarse tools in through any crevice,
by which they may reach the interior, and so alter its rate of

going for a while, and at last spoil the machine.
Men who exercise chiefly those faculties of the mind which work

independently of the will, - poets and artists, for instance, who
follow their imagination in their creative moments, instead of

keeping it in hand as your logicians and practical men do with
their reasoningfaculty, - such men are too apt to call in the

mechanical appliances to help them govern their intellects.
- He means they get drunk, - said the young fellow already alluded

to by name.
Do you think men of true genius are apt to indulge in the use of

inebriating fluids? said the divinity-student.
If you think you are strong enough to bear what I am going to say,

- I replied, - I will talk to you about this. But mind, now, these
are the things that some foolish people call DANGEROUS subjects, -

as if these vices which burrow into people's souls, as the Guinea-
worm burrows into the naked feet of West-Indian slaves, would be

more mischievous when seen than out of sight. Now the true way to
deal with those obstinate animals, which are a dozen feet long,

some of them, and no bigger than a horse hair, is to get a piece of
silk round their HEADS, and pull them out very cautiously. If you

only break them off, they grow worse than ever, and sometimes kill
the person who has the misfortune to harbor one of them. Whence it

is plain that the first thing to do is to find out where the head
lies.

Just so of all the vices, and particularly of this vice of
intemperance. What is the head of it, and where does it lie? For

you may depend upon it, there is not one of these vices that has
not a head of its own, - an intelligence, - a meaning, - a certain