Fit the same intellect to a man and it is a bow-
string,--to a woman and it is a harp-string. She is vibratile and
resonant all over, so she stirs with slighter musical tremblings of
the air about her.--Ah, me!--said my friend, the Poet, to me, the
other day,--what color would it not have given to my thoughts, and
what thrice-washed whiteness to my words, had I been fed on women's
praises! I should have grown like Marvell's fawn, -
"Lilies without; roses within!"
But then,--he added,--we all think, IF so and so, we should have
been this or that, as you were saying the other day, in those
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 creative imagination, 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.
Pages:
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212