Yet the Poet is in danger of indolence. For in his younger years joy comes to him unpurchased. To do, takes him out of his dream. To do nothing, is to live in an enchanted world; and with all tenderness be it said, he hath, too, his specific temptation to overmuch self-esteem. Because his specific faculty and habit are to refer every thing that befalls constantly to himself as a contemplative spirit. Herein is the most luminous intuition alone. The perversion is to be quick and keen in referring to the ignobler Self--for as I or you said, and all men may know, the Poet assuredly has two souls. Personal estimation, personal prospects! A sensibility to injury, to fear, to harm, to misprision--a quick jealousy--suspicion--soreness! You do see them in Poets--and in Artists, who after their kind are Poets--for they are Men. As to excessive reflection upon and admiration of their own intellectual powers, while we rightly condemn it, we should remember that the Poet _is_ gifted, and in comparison with most of those with whom he lives, is in certain directions far abler; and more delicate apprehensions he probably has than most or all of them--at least of such apprehensions as come under the Pleasures of Imagination. And when he begins to call auditors to his Harp--then, well-a-day!--then he lives and feeds upon the breath of praise--and upon the glow of sympathy--a flower that opens to the caress of zephyrs and sunbeams, and without them pines. Then comes envy and spiritual covetousness. Others obtain the praise and the sympathy--others who merit them less, or not at all. What a temptation to disparage all others--_alive_! And to the Poet, essentially plunged in the individualities of his own being, how easy! For each of his rivals has a different individuality from his own; and how easy to construe points of difference into points of inferiority! Easy to him whom pain wrings more than it does others--to whom disagreeable things are more disagreeable-- TALBOYS. Have done, sir, I beseech you, have done--talk not so of the Brotherhood. NORTH. I am thinking of some of the most majestic! SEWARD. Alas! it is true. NORTH. Mr Stewart more than insinuates, with a wavering and equivocating uncertainty of assertion he signifies, that the POET, or poetic mind, is not much endowed with "common sense." Talboys, what say you? TALBOYS. I rather think it unusually well-endowed that way, and that it is the opposite class of minds--those that cultivate abstract science--that have, or seem to have, least of it. SEWARD.