Here is my Garret up five flights of stairs;
Here's where I deal in dreams and ply in fancies,
Here is the wonder-shop of all my wares,
My sounding sonnets and my red romances.
Here's where I challenge Fate and ring my rhymes,
And grope at glory--aye, and starve at times.
Here is my Stronghold: stout of heart am I,
Greeting each dawn as songful as a linnet;
And when at night on yon poor bed I lie
(Blessing the world and every soul that's in it),
Here's where I thank the Lord no shadow bars
My skylight's vision of the valiant stars.
Here is my Palace tapestried with dreams.
Ah! though to-night ten _sous_ are all my treasure,
While in my gaze immortal beauty gleams,
Am I not dowered with wealth beyond all measure?
Though in my ragged coat my songs I sing,
King of my soul, I envy not the king.
Here is my Haven: it's so quiet here;
Only the scratch of pen, the candle's flutter;
Shabby and bare and small, but O how dear!
Mark you--my table with my work a-clutter,
My shelf of tattered books along the wall,
My bed, my broken chair--that's nearly all.
Only four faded walls, yet mine, all mine.
Oh, you fine folks, a pauper scorns your pity.
Look, where above me stars of rapture shine;
See, where below me gleams the siren city . . .
Am I not rich?--a millionaire no less,
If wealth be told in terms of Happiness.
Ten _sous_. . . . I think one can sing best of poverty when one is
holding it at arm's length. I'm sure that when I wrote these lines,
fortune had for a moment tweaked me by the nose. To-night, however, I
am truly down to ten _sous_. It is for that I have stayed in my room
all day, rolled in my blankets and clutching my pen with clammy fingers.
I must work, work, work. I must finish my book before poverty crushes
me. I am not only writing for my living but for my life. Even to-day my
Muse was mutinous. For hours and hours anxiously I stared at a paper
that was blank; nervously I paced up and down my garret; bitterly I
flung myself on my bed. Then suddenly it all came. Line after line I
wrote with hardly a halt. So I made another of my Ballads of the
Boulevards. Here it is: