Now you may believe it
or not, but I've always had a kind of crawling reverence for things
of the mind, and for men who go in for 'em. You can't think the
amount of poetry, for instance, I've read in my time, just wondering
how the devil it was done. But it's no use; it never was any use,
even in those days. No man of the kind I wanted to worship could
ever take me seriously. I remember once being introduced to a poet
whose stuff I knew by heart, almost every line of it, and when I
blurted out some silly enthusiasm--sort of thing a well-meaning
Philistine does say, don't you know?--he put the lid down on me with
"Now, that's most interesting. I've often wondered if what I write
appealed to one of your--er--interests, and if so, how."
Well that's where I always felt Foe could help. And yet he didn't
help very much. He read a heap of poetry--on the sly, as it were;
and one night I coaxed him off to a talk about Browning.
His language on the way home was three-parts blasphemy.
Am I making him at all clear to you? He kept his intellect in a cage
all to itself, so to speak.
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