There Are Certain Half-dreaming Moods Of Mind

Some Minds Corrode And Grow Inactive Under The Loss Of Personal Liberty; Others Grow Morbid And Irritable; But It Is The Nature Of The Poet To Become Tender And Imaginitive In The Loneliness Of Confinement. He Banquets Upon The Honey Of His Own Thoughts, And, Like The Captive Bird, Pours Forth His Soul In Melody.

How We Delight To Build Our Recollections Upon Some Basis Of Reality,--a Place, A Country, A Local Habitation! How The Events Of Life, As We Look Back Upon Them, Have Grown Into The Well-remembered Background Of The Places Where They Fell Upon Us! Here Is Some Sunny Garden Or Summer Lane, Beautified And Canonized Forever, With The Flood Of A Great Joy; And Here Are Dim And Silent Places,--rooms Always Shadowed And Dark To Us, Whatever They May Be To Others,--where Distress Or Death Came Once, And Since Then Dwells Forevermore.

Nature Seems To Delight In Disappointing The Assuduities Of Art, With Which It Would Rear Dulness To Maturity, And To Glory In The Vigor And Luxuriance Of Her Chance Productions. She Scatters The Seeds Of Genius To The Winds, And Though Some May Perish Among The Stony Places Of The World, And Some May Be Choked By The Thorns And Brambles Of Early Adversity, Yet Others Will Now And Then Strike Root Even In The Clefts Of The Rock, Struggle Bravely Up Into Sunshine, And Spread Over Their Sterile Birthplace All The Beauties Of Vegetation.

The Literary World Is Made Up Of Little Confederacies, Each Looking Upon Its Own Members As The Lights Of The Universe; And Considering All Others As Mere Transient Meteors, Doomed To Soon Fall And Be Forgotten, While Its Own Luminaries Are To Shine Steadily Into Immortality.

Others May Write From The Head, But He Writes From The Heart, And The Heart Will Always Understand Him.