From his twenty-third year his days were passed in sinning and repenting.

Poetry and love-making should be carried on with caution:  they form a terrific tax on life’s forces.  Most poets die young, not because the gods especially love them, but because life is a bank-account, and to wipe out your balance is to have your checks protested.  The excesses of youth are drafts payable at maturity.  Chatterton dead at eighteen, Keats at twenty-six, Shelley at thirty-three, Byron at thirty-six, Poe at forty, and Burns at thirty-seven, are the rule.  When drafts made by the men mentioned became due, there was no balance to their credit and Charon beckoned.

Most life-insurance companies now ask the applicant this question, “Do you write poetry to excess?” Shakespeare, to be sure, clung to life until he was fifty-three, but this seems to be the limit.  Dickens and Thackeray, their candles well burned out, also died under sixty.  Of course, I know that Browning, Tennyson, Morris and Bryant lived to a fair old age, but this was on borrowed time, for in the early life of each there was a hiatus of from ten to eighteen years, when the men never wrote a line, nor touched a drop of anything, bravely eschewing all honey from Hymettus.  Then the four men last named were all happily married, and married life is favorable to longevity, but not to poetry.  As a rule only single men, or those unhappily mated, make love and write poetry.  Men happily married make money, cultivate content, and evolve an aldermanic front; but love and poetry are symptoms of unrest.  Thus is Emerson’s proposition partially proven, that in life all things are bought and must be paid for with a price—­even success and happiness.

* * * * *

Burns once explained to Doctor Moore that the first fine, careless rapture of his song was awakened into being when he was sixteen years old, by “a bonnie sweet sonsie lass” whom we now know as “Handsome Nell.”  Her other name to us is vapor, and history is silent as to her life-pilgrimage.  Whether she lived to realize that she had first given voice to one of the great singers of earth—­of this we are also ignorant.  She was one year younger than Burns, and little more than a child when she and Bobby lagged behind the troop of tired haymakers, and walked home, hand in hand, in the gloaming.  Here is one of the stanzas addressed to “Handsome Nell”: 

    “She dresses all so clean and neat,
    Both decent and genteel,
    And then there’s something in her gait
    Makes any dress look weel.”

And how could Nell then ever guess why her cheeks burned scarlet, and why she was so sorry when haying-time was over?  She was sweet, innocent, artless, and their love was very natural, tender, innocent.  It’s a pity that all loves can not remain in just that idyllic, milkmaid stage, where the girls and boys awaken in the early morning with the birds, and hasten forth barefoot across the dewy fields to