Book 4 — 254.

Those who Anticipate.—What distinguishes poetic natures, but is also a danger for them, is their imagination, which exhausts itself in advance: which anticipates what will happen or what may happen, which enjoys and suffers in advance, and which at the final moment of the event or the action is already fatigued. Lord Byron, who was only too familiar with this, wrote in his diary: “If ever [pg 244] I have a son he shall choose a very prosaic profession—that of a lawyer or a pirate.”