And what would it cost?--O God! Is there a railroad in this country so small that its earnings would not pay for it--for the whole of the thousand? Why, pay a poet five hundred dollars a year, and he is a rich man; if he is not, he is no poet, but a knave. * * * * * And there would be waste?--Yes--where is there not waste? But grant that in the whole thousand there is just _one_ who is a master mind; and that him you set free and keep from defeat--that him with all his glory you make yours--and then tell me if there be any other way in this world that you could have done so much for man with your money! * * * * * --No, these are not your ways, oh you cruel world! You let every man go his way--you let him starve, you let him die in any hole that he can find. The poet--tenderest and most sensitive of all men! The poet--the master of the arts of suffering! Exposed on every side, nervous, haunted, unused to the world, knowing how to feel and knowing that alone! Is not his life an agony under any conditions,--is he not tortured for you--the world? And you leave him helpless, despairing! What is the matter with you?--How can you be so blind? There are some of you who really love books--look and see the story of genius--if it be not a thing to make you shudder and turn sick. It has been so through all the ages, and it will be so through all the ages to come, until society has a conscience and a soul. Tell me if there is anything in this world more frightful than the lot of the poets who have been born poor--of Marlowe and Chatterton and Goldsmith, Johnson and Burns and Keats! And who can tell how many were choked before even their first utterance? * * * * * I can not talk of that, for it makes me sick; but I will talk of the poets who were born rich. Is it not singular--is it not terrible--how many of the great stalwart ones were rich? To be educated, to own books, to hear music, to dwell in the country, to be free from men and men's judgments! Oh, the words break my heart! * * * * * --But was not Goethe rich, and did he not have these things? And was not Hugo rich? And Milton? When he left college he spent five years at his father's country place and wrote four poems that have done more to make men happy than if they had cost many millions of dollars. * * * * * But let me come to what I spoke of before, the seven poets of this century in England. * * * * * I name Wordsworth and Byron, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne, Shelley and Keats. I said that six of them were independent, and that the other--the greatest--died like a dog. * * * * *