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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: a modern may still read and read over again with pleasure, he
has perhaps the least to say. His poems seem to bear
testimony rather to the fashion of rhyming, which
distinguished the age, than to any special vocation in the
man himself. Some of them are drawing-room exercises and the
rest seem made by habit. Great writers are struck with
something in nature or society, with which they become
pregnant and longing; they are possessed with an idea, and
cannot be at peace until they have put it outside of them in
some distinct embodiment. But with Charles literature was an
object rather than a mean; he was one who loved bandying
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