It is the poet’s function to keep before the minds of the people not only the underlying truths and beauties of all Nature, but the high and pure ideal of humanity which all should strive to attain.
Learn that nonsense is none the less nonsense because it is in rhyme; and that rhyme without a purpose or a thought that has not been better expressed before is a public nuisance, only to be tolerated because it is good for trade.
The experience of suffering has been declared on the highest authority to be necessary to every poet who would touch the hearts of his fellow-creatures.
The heart, unlike the fancy and the imagination, is not complex, and may be reached by the same weapons of thought in the most luxurious court of Christendom as in the tent of the Arab or the wigwam of the Cherokee.
True, sharp, precise thought is preferable to a cloudy fancy; and a hundred acres of solid earth are far more valuable than a million acres of cloud and vapour.
