And there are poets in the circus. They are not, perhaps, the men and women who make their living by their skill and daring, risking their lives to entertain the world. These are not poets; they are artists whose methods are purely objective. No, the subjective artists, the poets, are to be found in the basement, if the show is at the Garden, or, if the show be outside New York they are to be found in the little tents--the side-shows. This is not a mere sneer at the craft of poetry, a mere statement that poets are freaks. Poets are not freaks. But freaks are poets. Rossetti said it. "Of thine own tears," he wrote, "thy song must tears beget. O singer, magic mirror hast thou none, save thine own manifest heart." Behold, therefore, the man on whom a crushing misfortune has come. He puts his grief into fair words, and shows it to the public. Thereby he gets money and fame. Behold, therefore, a man whom misfortune touched before his birth, and dwarfed him, made him a ridiculous image of humanity. He shows his misfortune to the public and gets money and fame thereby. This man exhibits his lack of faith in a sonnet-sequence; that man exhibits his lack of bones in a tent. This poet shows a soul scarred by the cruel whips of injustice; this man a back scarred by the tattooer's needles. But the freaks would not like to change places with the poets. The freaks get large salaries (they seem large to poets), and they are carefully tended, for they are delicate. See, here is a man who lives although his back is broken. There is a crowd around him; how interested they are! Would they be as interested in a poet who lived although his heart was broken? Probably not. But then, there are not many freaks. II When Tom Gradgrind (who had, you remember, robbed the Coketown Bank, and been saved from punishment by the amiable intervention of Sleary's Circus) was living out his exile somewhere in South America, he often longed, Charles Dickens tells us in the engaging tale called "Hard Times," to be back in England with his sister. But what phase of his dismal boyhood and wasted later years did he see in his homesick dreams? What episodes of his life in England did it give him pleasure to relive in memory? Dickens does not tell us. But no one who has read "Hard Times" and seen a circus needs to be told. The repentant exile, toiling under the tropic sun, had no affectionate recollections of Stone Lodge, his father's dreary mansion in Coketown, with its metallurgical cabinet, its conchological cabinet, and its mineralogical cabinet. Nor was it with anything approaching happiness that he thought of the Coketown Bank, the scene of some years of dull labor and of one moment of moral catastrophe.