might consider it worth while to
set up a school for instruction in the art. "Poetry taught in twelve
lessons." Congenital idiocy is no disqualification. Anybody can write
"poetry." It is a most unenviable distinction to leave published a thin
volume of verse, which nobody wanted, nobody buys, nobody reads, nobody
cares for except the author, who cries over its pathos, poor fellow, and
revels in its beauties, which he has all to himself. Come! who will be
my pupils in a Course,--Poetry taught in twelve lessons? That made a
laugh, in which most of The Teacups, myself included, joined heartily.
Through it all I heard the sweet tones of Number Five's caressing voice;
not because it was more penetrating or louder than the others, for it was
low and soft, but it was so different from the others, there was so much
more life,--the life of sweet womanhood,--dissolved in it.

(Of course he will fall in love with her. "He? Who?" Why, the
newcomer, the Counsellor. Did I not see his eyes turn toward her as the
silvery notes rippled from her throat? Did they not follow her in her
movements, as she turned her tread this or that way?

--What nonsense for me to be arranging matters between two people
strangers to each other before to-day!)

"A fellow writes in verse when he has nothing to say, and feels too dull
and silly to say it in prose," said Number Seven.

This made us laugh again, good-naturedly. I was pleased with a kind of
truth which it seemed to me to wrap up in its rather startling
affirmation. I gave a piece of advice the other day which I said I
thought deserved a paragraph to itself. It was from a letter I wrote not
long ago to an unknown young correspondent, who had a longing for seeing
himself in verse but was not hopelessly infatuated with the idea that he
was born a "poet." "When you write in prose," I said, "you say what you
mean. When you write in verse you say what you must." I was thinking
more especially of rhymed verse. Rhythm alone is a tether, and not a
very long one. But rhymes are iron fetters; it is dragging a chain and
ball to march under their incumbrance; it is a clog-dance you are
figuring in, when you execute your metrical pas seul. Consider under
what a disadvantage your thinking powers are laboring when you are
handicapped by the inexorable demands of our scanty English rhyming
vocabulary! You want to say something about the heavenly bodies, and you
have a beautiful line ending with the word sta