The poet may test the case by the relative amounts he pays his butcher and his bookseller.  So far as I know, he pays as little for his poetry as possible, and never buys a volume by a brother-singer till he has vainly tried six different ways to get a presentation copy.  The poet seems incapable of mastering the rudimentary truth that ethereals must be based on materials.  ‘No song, no supper’ is the old saw.  It is equally true reversed—­no supper, no song.  The empty-stomach theory of creation is a cruel fallacy, though undoubtedly hunger has sometimes been the spur which the clear soul doth raise.

The conditions of existence compel the publisher to be a tradesman on the same material basis as any other.  Ideally, a poem, like any other beautiful thing, is beyond price; but, practically, its value depends on the number of individuals who can be prevailed upon to purchase it.  In its ethereal—­otherwise its unprinted—­state, it is only subject to the laws of the celestial ether, one of which is that it yields no money; properly speaking, money is there an irrelevant condition.  Byron, you remember, would not for a long time accept any money from Murray for his poems, successful as they were.  He had a proper sense of the indignity of selling the children of his soul.  The incongruity is much as though we might go to Portland Road and buy an angel, just as we buy a parrot.  The transactions of poetry and of sale are on two different planes.  But so soon as, shall we say, you debase poetry by bringing it down to the lower plane, it becomes subject to the laws of that plane.  An unprinted poem is a spiritual thing, but a printed poem is subject to the laws of matter.  In the heaven of the poet’s imagination there are no printers and paper-makers, no binders, no discounts to the trade and thirteen to the dozen; but on earth, where alone, so far as we know, books exist, these terrestrial beings and conditions are of paramount importance, and cannot be ignored.  It may be perfectly true that a certain poem is so fine that, in a properly constituted cosmogony, it ought to support you to the end of your days; but is the publisher to blame because, in spite of its manifest genius, he can sell no more than 500 copies?

Then, to take another point of view, it is, I think, quite demonstrable that, compared with the men of many other callings, a poet who can get his verses accepted is very well paid.  Take a typical instance.  You spend an absolutely beatific evening with Clarinda in the moonlit woodland.  You go home and relieve your emotions in a sonnet, which, we will say, at a generous allowance, takes you half an hour to write.  Next morning in that cold calculating mood for which no business man can match a poet, you copy it out fair and send it to a friendly editor.  Perhaps out of Clarinda alone you beget a sonnet a week, which at L2, 2s. a week is L109, 4s. a year—­not to speak of Phyllis and Dulcinea.  At any rate, take that one sonnet.  For an evening with Clarinda,