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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. cover

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 6: COLUMBUS
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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.

COLUMBUS

Would that we had the fortunes of Columbus.
Sailing his caravels a trackless way,
He found a Universe—he sought Cathay.
God give such dawns as when, his venture o’er,
The Sailor looked upon San Salvador.
God lead us past the setting of the sun
To wizard islands, of august surprise;
God make our blunders wise.