Page:Sarah Sheppard - L. E. L.pdf/132

 similitude: I am at the beck of others; I may scarcely think my own thoughts; they must run in whatever channel public taste may choose. And that reminds me I promised Curl his pamphlet this very night. How weary I am of exhausting the resources of language in dressing up the vague common-places of party, or giving plausibility to sophisms I feel to be untrue! but it must be done; and muttering to him self,— For inspiration round his head, The goddess Want her pinions spread,' he drew his table towards him, and began to write.***At first he wrote mechanically. It was no longer the eager and impassioned writer who in his early composition forgot want, cold and misery. No, the real had eaten like rust into his soul."



"Composition, like everything else, feels the influence of time. At first all is poetry with the young poet; his heart is full of emotions eagerly struggling for utterance; everything suggests the exercise of his own sweet art. A leaf, a flower, the star far off in the serene midnight, a look, a word, are enough for a poem. Gradually this profusion exhausts itself, the mind grows less fanciful, and poetry is rather a power than a passion. Feelings have hardened into thoughts, and the sensations of others are no longer almost as if they had been matter of experience. The world has become real, and we have become real along with it. Our own knowledge is now the material wherewith we work; and we have gathered a stock of recollections, bitter and pleasant, which now furnish the subjects that we once created; but these do not come at the moment's notice like our former fantasies: we must be in the mood; and such mood