Not that praise must not always, of necessity, be delightful to the artist, but that it may be redundant to his content.  Do you think so? or not?  It appears to me that poets who, like Keats, are highly susceptible to criticism, must be jealous, in their own persons, of the future honour of their works.  Because, if a work is worthy, honour must follow it, though the worker should not live to see that following overtaking.  Now, is it not enough that the work be honoured—­enough I mean, for the worker?  And is it not enough to keep down a poet’s ordinary wearing anxieties, to think, that if his work be worthy it will have honour, and, if not, that ‘Sparta must have nobler sons than he’?  I am writing nothing applicable, I see, to anything in question, but when one falls into a favourite train of thought, one indulges oneself in thinking on.  I began in thinking and wondering what sort of artistic constitution you had, being determined, as you may observe (with a sarcastic smile at the impertinence), to set about knowing as much as possible of you immediately.  Then you spoke of your ‘gentle audience’ (you began), and I, who know that you have not one but many enthusiastic admirers—­the ‘fit and few’ in the intense meaning—­yet not the diffused fame which will come to you presently, wrote on, down the margin of the subject, till I parted from it altogether.  But, after all, we are on the proper matter of sympathy.  And after all, and after all that has been said and mused upon the ‘natural ills,’ the anxiety, and wearing out experienced by the true artist,—­is not the good immeasurably greater than the evil?  Is it not great good, and great joy?  For my part, I wonder sometimes—­I surprise myself wondering—­how without such an object and purpose of life, people find it worth while to live at all.  And, for happiness—­why, my only idea of happiness, as far as my personal enjoyment is concerned, (but I have been straightened in some respects and in comparison with the majority of livers!) lies deep in poetry and its associations.  And then, the escape from pangs of heart and bodily weakness—­when you throw off yourself—­what you feel to be yourself—­into another atmosphere and into other relations where your life may spread its wings out new, and gather on every separate plume a brightness from the sun of the sun!  Is it possible that imaginative writers should be so fond of depreciating and lamenting over their own destiny?  Possible, certainly—­but reasonable, not at all—­and grateful, less than anything!

My faults, my faults—­Shall I help you?  Ah—­you see them too well, I fear.  And do you know that I also have something of your feeling about ‘being about to begin,’ or I should dare to praise you for having it.  But in you, it is different—­it is, in you, a virtue.  When Prometheus had recounted a long list of sorrows to be endured by Io, and declared at last that he was [Greek:  medepo en prooimiois],[1] poor Io burst out crying.  And when the author of ‘Paracelsus’ and the ‘Bells and Pomegranates’ says that he is only ‘going to begin’ we may well (to take ‘the opposite idea,’ as you write) rejoice and clap our hands.  Yet I believe that, whatever you may have done, you will do what is greater.  It is my faith for you.