rs. Were you writing in
prose, your imagination, your fancy, your rhetoric, your musical ear for
the harmonies of language, would all have full play. But there is your
rhyme fastening you by the leg, and you must either reject the line which
pleases you, or you must whip your hobbling fancy and all your limping
thoughts into the traces which are hitched to one of three or four or
half a dozen serviceable words. You cannot make any use of cars, I will
suppose; you have no occasion to talk about scars; "the red planet Mars"
has been used already; Dibdin has said enough about the gallant tars;
what is there left for you but bars? So you give up your trains of
thought, capitulate to necessity, and manage to lug in some kind of
allusion, in place or out of place, which will allow you to make use of
bars. Can there be imagined a more certain process for breaking up all
continuity of thought, for taking out all the vigor, all the virility,
which belongs to natural prose as the vehicle of strong, graceful,
spontaneous thought, than this miserable subjugation of intellect to
the-clink of well or ill matched syllables? I think you will smile if I
tell you of an idea I have had about teaching the art of writing "poems"
to the half-witted children at the Idiot Asylum. The trick of rhyming
cannot be more usefully employed than in furnishing a pleasant amusement
to the poor feeble-minded children. I should feel that I was well
employed in getting up a Primer for the pupils of the Asylum, and other
young persons who are incapable of serious thought and connected
expression. I would start in the simplest way; thus:--

When darkness veils the evening....
I love to close my weary....

The pupil begins by supplying the missing words, which most children who
are able to keep out of fire and water can accomplish after a certain
number of trials. When the poet that is to be has got so as to perform
this task easily, a skeleton verse, in which two or three words of each
line are omitted, is given the child to fill up. By and by the more
difficult forms of metre are outlined, until at length a feebleminded
child can make out a sonnet, completely equipped with its four pairs of
rhymes in the first section and its three pairs in the second part.

Number Seven interrupted my discourse somewhat abruptly, as is his wont;
for we grant him a license, in virtue of his eccentricity, which we
should hardly expect to be claimed by a perfectly