254 INDOOR STUDIES 



speaks from real insight and conviction of his own, 

 men are always glad to hear him, whether they 

 agree with him or not. So much writing or speak- 

 ing is like mere machine- work, as if you turned a 

 crank and the piece or discourse came out. It is 

 not the man's real mind, his real experience. This 

 he does not know how to get at; it has no connec- 

 tion with his speaking or writing faculty. How 

 rare are real poems, — poems that spring from real 

 feeling, a real throb of emotion, and not from a 

 mere surface-itching of the mind for literary expres- 

 sion! The world is full of "rhyming parasites," 

 as Milton called them. The great mass of the 

 poetry of any age is purely artificial, and has no 

 root in real things. It is a kind of masquerading. 

 The stock poetic forms are masks behind which the 

 poetlings hide their real poverty of thought and 

 feeling. In prose one has no such factitious aids; 

 here he must stand upon his own merits; he has 

 not the cloak of Milton, or Tennyson, or Spenser, 

 to hide in. 



It is, of course, the young writer who oftenest 

 fails to speak his real mind, or to speak from any 

 proper basis of insight and conviction. He is car- 

 ried away by a fancy, a love of novelty, or an 

 affectation of originality. The strange things, the 

 novel things, are seldom true. Look for truth under 

 your feet. To be original, Carlyle said, is to be 

 sincere. When one is young, how many discover- 

 ies he makes, — real mares'-eggs, which by and by 

 turn out to be nothing but field-pumpkins! 



