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It so happened that in the winter of 1822-3, an opportunity offered itself for acquiring a piece of freehold land of about seven acres, close to the poet's cottage, known to the people of Helpston as 'Bachelors' Hall' and already noticed as belonging to two brothers of the name of Billing.

He and the Nurse come forth; in spite of her appeal for silence, he denounces her for tempting him. When she reminds him of his oath of secrecy, he answers "My tongue has sworn, but not my will" a line pounced upon as immoral by the poet's many foes. Hippolytus' long denunciation of women has been similarly considered to prove that the poet was an enemy of their sex.

On the contrary, certain young aspirants to the poet's laurel, feeling that the singer's indebtedness to love is an overworked theme, have tried, like the non-lover of the Phaedrus, to charm the literary public by the novelty of a different profession.

In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke likewise laid too much stress upon the physical aspect of the poet's nature, in accounting for the sublime in poetry as originating in the sense of pain, and the beautiful as originating in pleasure.

Odell said there were people and children enough without them, and she had told her husband they would be home to supper. "Do we go by the poet's house?" Hanny asked as they passed the cross-road. "The poet?" Two or three of the children stared blankly. "Oh, Hanny means that Mr. Poe. Why, yes; it's the old Cromwell house. It isn't much to see. There, that little cottage."

In the Homeric picture Achilleus sits solitary in his tent, bound as it were to the affections of earth by the one tie of his friendship for Patroclos. No figure has ever been painted by a poet's pen more terrible in the loneliness of its wrath, its sorrow, its revenge. But from one end of his song to the other Vergil has surrounded Æneas with the ties and affections of home.

The poet's greatest biographer, David Masson, says "Until Milton was thirty-two years of age, if even then, he did not earn a penny for himself." Such a course would ruin ninety-nine out of every hundred talented young men; but it was the making of Milton. He spent those years in careful study and in writing his immortal early poems.

Not that he ever consciously falsifies or modifies the revelation given him in his moment of inspiration, but the revelation is ever hauntingly incomplete. The slightest adverse influence may jar upon the harmony between the poet's soul and the spirit of poetry.

Eminent among these was the tragedy of Andromana, or the Merchant's Wife, long since rejected from the list of Shirley's works as unworthy of that poet's hand. Unquestionably it was so; not less unworthy than A Larum for London of Marlowe's. The consequent inference that it must needs be the work of the new Shakespeare's was surely no less cogent in this than in the former case.

Immediately above the grotto, in the direction of the town, we come upon a simple gravestone of white marble the monument of the poet Virgil. A long flight of steps leads to the garden containing this monument: the poet's ashes do not, however, rest here; the spot where he sleeps cannot be accurately determined, and this monument is only raised to his memory.