People listen to him as they would to any other
traveller come from distant countries, and all he asks for is
courtesy even as he himself is courteous.
Inferior poets are those who forget their dignity--and, indeed,
their only chance of being permitted to live--and to make
friends try to enter into the lives of the people whom they
would propitiate, and so become teachers and moralists and
preachers. And soon for penalty of their rashness and folly
they forget their own land of the solitary, and its speech
perishes from their lips. The traveller's tales are of all the
most precious, because he comes from a land--the poet's
solitude--which no other feet have trodden and which no other
feet will tread.
So, briefly and awkwardly, he justifies himself, being given (as
Mrs. Quickly apologized) to "allicholy and musing." Oh, it is not
easy! As Gilbert Chesterton said, in a noble poem:
The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.
[Illustration]
1100 WORDS
The managing editor, the city editor, the production manager, the
foreman of the composing room, and the leading editorial writer
having all said to us with a great deal of sternness, "Your copy for
Saturday has got to be upstairs by such and such a time, because we
are going to make up the page at so and so A.
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