Page:The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a Book for an Idle Holiday - Jerome (1886).djvu/153

 Huddle them up in your lumber-rooms, oh, world! Shut them fast in, and turn the key of poverty upon them. Weld close the bars, and let them fret their hero lives away within the narrow cage. Leave them there to starve, and rot, and die. Laugh at the frenzied beatings of their hands against the door. Roll onward in your dust and noise, and pass them by, forgotten.

But take care, lest they turn and sting you. All do not, like the fabled Phœnix, warble sweet melodies in their agony; sometimes they spit venom—venom you must breathe whether you will or no, for you cannot seal their mouths, though you may fetter their limbs. You can lock the door upon them, but they burst open their shaky lattices, and call out over the housetops so that men cannot but hear. You hounded wild Rousseau into the meanest garret of the Rue St Jacques, and jeered at his angry shrieks. But the thin, piping tones swelled, a hundred years later, into the sullen roar of the French Revolution, and civilisation to this day is quivering to the reverberations of his voice.

As for myself, however, I like an attic. Not to live in: as residences they are inconvenient. There is too much getting up and down stairs connected with them to please me. It puts one unpleasantly in mind of the tread-mill. The form of the ceiling offers too many facilities for bumping your head, and too few for shav-