Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/309

Rh industry. It is what forces the hero, the artist, the poet, to be absorbed in a special office, and decides his choice of it.

The world is equipped with steadfast workers whose natural taste and courageous, strenuous Talent and executive service. labor do not lift them quite above the mediocre. The difference between these, the serviceable rank and file, and the originative leaders, is one of kind, not of degree. However admirable their skill and service in time become, they do not get far apart from impressions common to us all. We cannot dispense with their army in executive and mechanical fields of action. It is a question whether they are so essential to arts of taste and investigation; to philosophy, painting, music; to the creative arts of the novelist and poet. But with respect to these, it would be most unjust to confound them with the upstarts whose condign