to
Whittier's "The Prisoner for Debt," to which they are strikingly
similar in melancholic mood.

In 1846, at the age of 37, Lincoln conducted a literary correspondence
with a friend, William Johnson by name, of like poetic tastes. In
April of this year he wrote the following letter to Johnson:

Tremont, April 18, 1846.

FRIEND JOHNSTON: Your letter, written some six weeks since,
was received in due course, and also the paper with the
parody. It is true, as suggested it might be, that I have
never seen Poe's "Raven"; and I very well know that a parody
is almost entirely dependent for its interest upon the
reader's acquaintance with the original. Still there is
enough in the polecat, self-considered, to afford one
several hearty laughs. I think four or five of the last
stanzas are decidedly funny, particularly where Jeremiah
"scrubbed and washed, and prayed and fasted."

I have not your letter now before me; but, from memory, I
think you ask me who is the author of the piece I sent you,
and that you do so ask as to indicate a slight suspicion
that I myself am the author. Beyond all question, I am not
the author. I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to
be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is. Neither
do I know who is the author. I met it in a straggling form
in a newspaper last summer, and I remember to have seen it
once before, about fifteen years ago, and this is all I know
about it.

The piece of poetry of my own which I alluded to, I was led
to write under the following circumstances. In the fall of
1844, thinking I might aid some to carry the State of
Indiana for Mr. Clay, I went into the neighborhood in that
State in which I was raised, where my mother and only sister
were buried, and from which I had been absent about fifteen
years.

That part of the country is, within itself, as unpoetical as
any spot of the earth; but still, seeing it and its objects
and inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly
poetry; though whether my expression of those feelings is
poetry is quite another question. When I got to writing,
the change of subject divided the thing into four little
divisions or cantos, the first only of which I send you now,
and may send the others hereafte