Poetry has been as serious a thing for me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing; there has been no playing at skittles for me at either. I never mistook pleasure as the final cause of poetry; nor leisure, for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work; not as mere hand and head work apart from the personal being, but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain; and, as work, I offer it to the public, feeling its faultiness more deeply than any of my readers, because measured from the height of my aspiration, but feeling also the reverence
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