THE dreamers sit and ponder on distant things and dim, across the
skyline yonder, where unknown planets swim; they roam the starry
reaches—at least, they think they do—with patches on their breeches and
holes in either shoe. The workers still are steaming around at useful
chores; they always save their dreaming for night, to mix with snores.
They’re toiling on their places, they’re raising roastin’ ears, they are
not keeping cases on far, uncharted spheres. They’re growing beans and
carrots, and hay that can’t be beat, while dreamers in their garrets
have not enough to eat. Oh, now and then a dreamer is most unduly smart,
and shows he is a screamer in letters or in art; but where one is a
winner, ten thousand dreamers weep because they lack a dinner, and have
no place to sleep. There is a streak of yellow in dreamers, as a class;
the worker is the fellow who makes things come to pass; he keeps the
forges burning, the dinner pail he fills, he keeps the pulleys turning
in forty thousand mills. The man with dreams a-plenty, who lives on
musty prunes, beside him looks like twenty or eighteen picayunes.
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