What man is strong until he stands alone?

What man ... what woman?  For have I not felt twenty times the desolate advantage of being insulated here and of not minding anybody when I made my poems?—­of living a little like a disembodied spirit, and caring less for suppositious criticism than for the black fly buzzing in the pane?—­That made me what dear Mr. Kenyon calls ’insolent,’—­untimid, and unconventional in my degree; and not so much by strength, you see, as by separation. You touch your greater ends by mere strength; breaking with your own hands the hampering threads which, in your position would have hampered me.

Still ... when all is changed for me now, and different, it is not possible, ... for all the changing, nor for all your line and my speculation, ... that I should not be better and stronger for being within your influences and sympathies, in this way of writing as in other ways.  We shall see—­you will see.  Yet I have been idle lately I confess; leaning half out of some turret-window of the castle of Indolence and watching the new sunrise—­as why not?—­Do I mean to be idle always?—­no!—­and am I not an industrious worker on the average of days?  Indeed yes!  Also I have been less idle than you think perhaps, even this last year, though the results seem so like trifling:  and I shall set about the prose papers for the New York people, and the something rather better besides we may hope ... may I not hope, if you wish it?  Only there is no ‘crown’ for me, be sure, except what grows from this letter and such letters ... this sense of being anything to one! there is no room for another crown.  Have I a great head like Goethe’s that there should be room? and mine is bent down already by the unused weight—­and as to bearing it, ...  ’Will it do,—­tell me; to treat that as a light effort, an easy matter?’

Now let me remember to tell you that the line of yours I have just quoted, and which has been present with me since you wrote it, Mr. Chorley has quoted too in his new novel of ‘Pomfret.’  You were right in your identifying of servant and waistcoat—­and Wilson waited only till you had gone on Saturday, to give me a parcel and note; the novel itself in fact, which Mr. Chorley had the kindness to send me ’some days or weeks,’ said the note, ‘previous to the publication.’  Very goodnatured of him certainly:  and the book seems to me his best work in point of sustainment and vigour, and I am in process of being interested in it.  Not that he is a maker, even for this prose.  A feeler ... an observer ... a thinker even, in a certain sphere—­but a maker ... no, as it seems to me—­and if I were he, I would rather herd with the essayists than the novelists where he is too good to take inferior rank and not strong enough to ‘go up higher.’  Only it would be more right in me to be grateful than to talk so—­now wouldn’t it?

And here is Mr. Kenyon’s letter back again—­a kind good letter ... a letter I have liked to read (so it was kind and good in you to let me!)—­and he was with me to-day and praising the ‘Ride to Ghent,’ and praising the ‘Duchess,’ and praising you altogether as I liked to hear him.  The Ghent-ride was ’very fine’—­and the