[Footnote:
See _The Catalogue_. Another of his poems ridiculing poetesses is _The
Squinting Poetess_.] Despite a chivalrous sentimentality, Barry Cornwall
took his stand with Moore on the point, exhorting women to choose love
rather than a literary career. [Footnote: See _To a Poetess_. More
seriously, Landor offered the same discouragement to his young friend
with poetical tastes. [Footnote: See _To Write as Your Sweet Mother
Does_.] On the whole the prevalent view expressed early in the
nineteenth century is the considerate one that while women lack a
literary gift, they have, none the less, sweet poetical his heroes
harried by their genius into ill health, prince Athanase is
A youth who as with toil and travel
Had grown quite weak and gray before his time.
[Footnote: _Prince Athanase_, a fragment.]
In _Alastor_, too, we see the hero wasting away until
His limbs were lean; his scattered hair,
Sered by the autumn of strange suffering,
Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand
Hung like dead bone within his withered skin;
Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone
As in a furnace burning secretly
From his dark eyes alone.
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