"What," he exclaims, "has become of the glorious Apollo of the Greek? Where is the sunny ideal of the hellenistic heavens? Where the sacred sorrows of Christian perfection? Poetry is no more a garden of roses; it is a wild field of thorns, wherein he who walks leaves tracks of blood. At the entrance of this Parnassus stands Poverty, whom Virgil places _in faucibus orci_. Her complaints are in the midst of curses. She holds in her hand a skull, with strings of iron, and she sweeps them as a lyre with golden chords. Behind her are Crabbe, the Juvenal of the hospitals; Ebenezer Elliott, the singer of hunger; Cooper, the poet of suicide, and the author of _Ernest_, followed by a miserable train of children, whom manufacturers have famished, and young women whom excessive labor has demoralized and prostituted in the morning of their life. Mournful choir, to which these poets worthily respond." It is not very pleasant, to be sure, for a reader to pass from some agreeable representation to a frightful array of evils. The spectacle but too true of social infirmities troubles the sleep of the happy, and awakes with a start the drowsy hate of the unhappy. But there is no reason why he who suffers, should not utter his complaint. The Bible itself is not a stranger to vehement protestations against the apparent injustice of destiny. When Job arose from the ashes, surely it was not to sing to the passers-by some touching idylle in the style of Ruth and Naomi. He accused heaven and life, he cursed his friends, and his mother, without troubling himself to know whether his sorrows reached the lovers' palm-groves, or disturbed the wooings of the daughters of Idumea. The Sheffield blacksmith, among flaming furnaces, cannot sing the voluptuous sweets of existence. He strikes the anvil with a ring, and exclaims in a rough voice, amid smoke and fire: "Accursed be the muse of necessity and suffering! Who wishes her acquaintance? The poor, so despised! Write not their frightful history. Pride and vanity despise your labors. Who is he, I pray you, that artizan who uses the pen? What right has he to do so? Absurd rhymer, let him retire and pare his nails--and renounce a species of industry for which he was never made. You are accustomed only to oaths, and you are only a rough worker in poetry."