are more or less "ossified." Something like
these changes has taken place in the mind. It has lost the flexibility,
the plastic docility, which it had in youth and early manhood, when the
gristle had but just become hardened into bone. It is the nature of
poetry to writhe itself along through the tangled growths of the
vocabulary, as a snake winds through the grass, in sinuous, complex, and
unexpected curves, which crack every joint that is not supple as
india-rubber.

I had a poem that I wanted to print just here. But after what I have
this moment said, I hesitated, thinking that I might provoke the obvious
remark that I exemplified the unfitness of which I had been speaking. I
remembered the advice I had given to a poetical aspirant not long since,
which I think deserves a paragraph to itself.

My friend, I said, I hope you will not write in verse. When you write in
prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you
must.

Should I send this poem to the publishers, or not?

"Some said, 'John, print it;' others said, 'Not so.'"

I did not ask "some" or "others." Perhaps I should have thought it best
to keep my poem to myself and the few friends for whom it was written.
All at once, my daimon--that other Me over whom I button my waistcoat
when I button it over my own person--put it into my head to look up the
story of Madame Saqui. She was a famous danseuse, who danced Napoleon in
and out, and several other dynasties besides. Her last appearance was at
the age of seventy-six, which is rather late in life for the tight rope,
one of her specialties. Jules Janin mummified her when she died in 1866,
at the age of eighty. He spiced her up in his eulogy as if she had been
the queen of a modern Pharaoh. His foamy and flowery rhetoric put me
into such a state of good-nature that I said, I will print my poem, and
let the critical Gil Blas handle it as he did the archbishop's sermon, or
would have done, if he had been a writer for the "Salamanca Weekly."

It must be premised that a very beautiful loving cup was presented to me
on my recent birthday, by eleven ladies of my acquaintance. This was the
most costly and notable of all the many tributes I received, and for
which in different forms I expressed my gratitude.

TO THE ELEVEN LADIES

WHO PRESENTED ME WITH A SILVER LOVING CUP ON THE
TWENTY-NINTH OF AUGUST, M DCCC LXXXIX.

"Who gave this cup?" The secret thou wouldst steal