erses were well made, and he sympathized with him in
his delight at having found out the way to make them, though he was not
so much astonished as the boy that such a science as prosody should
exist. He praised the child's work, and no doubt smiled at it with the
mother; but he said that the poem spoke of heaven as a place in the sky,
and he wished him always to realize that heaven was a _state_ and not a
_place_, and that we could have it in this world as well as the next.
The boy promised that he would try to realize heaven as a state; but at
the bottom of his heart he despaired of getting that idea into poetry.
Everybody else who had made poetry spoke of heaven as a place; they even
called it a land, and put it in the sky; and he did not see how he was
to do otherwise, no matter what Swedenborg said. He revered Swedenborg;
he had a religious awe of the seer's lithograph portrait in a
full-bottom wig which hung in the front-room, but he did not see how
even Swedenborg could have helped calling heaven a place if he had been
making poetry.

The next year, or the next quarter, maybe, there was a new teacher; they
seem to have followed each other somewhat as people do in a dream; they
were not there, and then they were there; but, however the new one came,
the boys were some time in getting used to his authority. It appeared to
them that several of his acts were distinctly tyrannical, and were
encroachments upon rights of theirs which the other teacher, with all
his severity, had respected. My boy was inspired by the common mood to
write a tragedy which had the despotic behavior of the new teacher for
its subject, and which was intended to be represented by the boys in the
hayloft of a boy whose father had a stable without any horse in it. The
tragedy was written in the measure of the "Lady of the Lake," which was
the last poem my boy had heard his father reading aloud; it was very
easy kind of verse. At the same time, the boys were to be dressed as
Roman conspirators, and one of them was to give the teacher a petition
to read, while another plunged a dagger into his vitals, and still
another shouted, "Strike, Stephanos, strike!" It seemed to my boy that
he had invented a situation which he had lifted almost bodily out of
Goldsmith's history; and he did not feel that his lines,

"Come one, come all! This rock shall flee
From its firm base as soon as we,"

were too closely modelled upon Scott's lines