A Handy Guide for Beggars: Especially Those of the Poetic Fraternity / Being Sundry Explorations, Made While Afoot and Penniless in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. These Adventures Convey and Illustrate the Rules of Beggary for Poets and Some Others.

Chapter 39: THAT WHICH MEN HAIL AS KING

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About This Book

A series of episodic travel sketches and lyrical interludes records the narrator's afoot wanderings through Southern and Eastern states, combining practical rules for itinerant poets with vivid vignettes of hospitality, rejection, and small-town characters. Anecdotes range from freight-ride adventures and mountain baths to encounters with moonshiners and kindly householders, set amid reflections on voluntary poverty, artistic devotion, and the Gospel of Beauty. Interspersed poems and allegorical passages punctuate the narrative, offering both comic episodes and earnest meditations on artistic pilgrimage and the ethics of begging.

THAT WHICH MEN HAIL AS KING

Would I might rouse the Cæsar in you all,

(That which men hail as king, and bow them down)

Till you are crowned, or you refuse the crown.

Would I might wake the valor and the pride,

The eagle soul with which he soared and died,

Entering grandly then the fearful grave.

God help us build the world, like master-men,

God help us to be brave.