Poets must not meddle with opinions. The poet who becomes a fighting man circumscribes his activity and coarsens his mind. Milton's poetical genius never recovered the six political pamphlets he wrote. When I think of the poetical mind I think of an oak tree that all night and all day is drawing nourishment from the earth about its roots. A tree not so nourished, and with its roots not pressed deep down into the earth, would soon be overthrown soon laid prostrate by the storms of the upper air. Had his attachments sunk deeper, pushing their intricate & sensitive roots into kindly Mother Nature, Shelley, being kindly as well as fine, would not so easily have been overthrown by Godwin's stale philosophy--that man with a large head full of cold thought--and the Harriet episode would have been more human. I sometimes think that all of us mortal men, are companionable, but that commerce and progress and a false civilization have put weapons into our hands and taught us subterfuge and evasion, flight or attack. The poets and artists are in revolt and would have none of this, at least in their poetry, whatever they may do in their foolish logic. This is the unique charm of poetry and the inspiration of what, from time immemorial, people have agreed to call love, which is the true bond between man and man that will survive all others. Its perfect and complete expression is beauty, as ugliness is the expression of hatred or contempt or fear. Goethe said of himself that he could not hate, and was ill-advised enough to think it a blemish. If a poet hates, as sometime happens, love is not far away. We have the invention of the Sirens, who, though they have fish tails, are beautiful women; I think Homer was sorry for Thersites. Poets, being all compact of imagination and dream, are attached to the quiet of the soul; and ugliness is exhausting, while love and beauty replenish the wells. I think that but for some accident every great poet would have attained to length of years, and every minor poet also, while artists and poets of hate died young. My old school fellow, though delicate both as a boy and a man, lived to be long past seventy. He steered his course clear of opinion, hating no one and without contention. One never knew what he thought. One did know abundantly what he felt. Does anyone know what was Shakespeare's opinion of Juliet? Did he know himself? Milton would not have kept silent.