The poet is a tree that may be blown about by all winds and watered by every fall of dew; and bears his works as his fruit, as the _fablier_ of old bore his fables.

Why attach one's self to a master, or graft one's self upon a model?
It were better to be a bramble or a thistle, fed by the same earth as the cedar and the palm, than the fungus or the lichen of those noble trees.

The bramble lives, the fungus vegetates.

Moreover, however great the cedar and the palm may be, it is not with the sap one sucks from them that one can become great one's self.

A giant's parasite will be at best a dwarf.