had my heart in books and poetry, and my experience in reveries.  My sympathies drooped towards the ground like an untrained honeysuckle—­and but for one, in my own house—­but of this I cannot speak.  It was a lonely life, growing green like the grass around it.  Books and dreams were what I lived in—­and domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass.  And so time passed, and passed—­and afterwards, when my illness came and I seemed to stand at the edge of the world with all done, and no prospect (as appeared at one time) of ever passing the threshold of one room again; why then, I turned to thinking with some bitterness (after the greatest sorrow of my life had given me room and time to breathe) that I had stood blind in this temple I was about to leave—­that I had seen no Human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth were names to me, that I had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing in fact.  I was as a man dying who had not read Shakespeare, and it was too late! do you understand?  And do you also know what a disadvantage this ignorance is to my art?  Why, if I live on and yet do not escape from this seclusion, do you not perceive that I labour under signal disadvantages—­that I am, in a manner, as a blind poet?  Certainly, there is a compensation to a degree.  I have had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness and self-analysis, I make great guesses at Human nature in the main.  But how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life and man, for some....

But all grumbling is a vile thing.  We should all thank God for our measures of life, and think them enough for each of us.  I write so, that you may not mistake what I wrote before in relation to society, although you do not see from my point of view; and that you may understand what I mean fully when I say, that I have lived all my chief joys, and indeed nearly all emotions that go warmly by that name and relate to myself personally, in poetry and in poetry alone.  Like to write?  Of course, of course I do.  I seem to live while I write—­it is life, for me.  Why, what is to live?  Not to eat and drink and breathe,—­but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of being, passionately and joyfully.  And thus, one lives in composition surely—­not always—­but when the wheel goes round and the procession is uninterrupted.  Is it not so with you? oh—­it must be so.  For the rest, there will be necessarily a reaction; and, in my own particular case, whenever I see a poem of mine in print, or even smoothly transcribed, the reaction is most painful.  The pleasure, the sense of power, without which I could not write a line, is gone in a moment; and nothing remains but disappointment and humiliation.  I never wrote a poem which you could not persuade me to tear to pieces if you took me at the right moment!  I have a seasonable humility, I do assure you.