Calling Sprague “a true poet and a gentleman,” this early (perhaps earliest?) review offers a witty argument in defense of the idea that poets can function in the real, and even the business, world.

Every man, who owned a dollar in the bank in which he was employed, must have been in a cold sweat at the thought of the risk he had run in suffering any of his property to pass through the hands of a man of genius, who, lost in poetic visions, might not, with the eye of his body, see the difference between tens and hundreds. But we never heard that Mr. Sprague grew careless or inaccurate or inattentive to his employment after the sin of poetry was fairly laid at his door.

Private Collection