Page:Sarah Sheppard - L. E. L.pdf/124

, and to hope that our thoughts, destined to become parts of the human mind, will worthily fulfil the lofty duty assigned to their exercise."

And this was the career Walter Maynard now proposed to himself—a career begun under the brightest auspices of imagination, but closed amid the darkest shadows of disappointment and of hope unfulfilled. Such were the convictions whose reality he fully verified in his experience. He leaves the scene of his youthful dreams and noble aspirations to seek fame among men. He is soon destined to pine under the harsh realities of life. Necessity forces him to write for his daily bread. His own lofty and refined ideal of literature is brought down by the stern pressure of circumstances to the calculating question—Will what I have written sell? At length, worn out by the conflicts between the actual and imaginative, after having exhausted his energies of body and mind for the amusement of others, he is left to die, almost alone, neglected by all save his earliest friends, and mourning over the frequent abuse of talents of which approaching death reveals to him the true and high responsibility.

Let us, however, first follow him, from the quiet of his early abode, through some of his struggles with circumstance and misfortune. From these, alas! genius can grant no exemption; rather does it render more keenly alive to outward evil that imaginative temperament which is not only susceptible to the thorns, but prone to multiply the briars of this working-day world.

The collision of the poet's ideal hopes with the publisher's matter-of-fact mercenary proceedings is graphically described in Maynard's first interview with his bookseller:—

"It was with slow and languid steps that Walter