ny and the rooms few, we had plenty of
time to enjoy the sight. It was exciting, fascinating, almost
bewildering; and feeling the mystic mood, I proposed to write a poem on
it, to which Halicarnassus said he had not the smallest objection,
provided he should not be held liable to read it, adding, as he offered
me his pencil, that it was just the thing,--he wanted some narcotic to
counteract the stimulus of the fresh cold air after the long and heated
ride, or he should get no sleep for the night.

I do not believe there is in our beautiful but distracted country a
single person who is the subject of so cold-blooded, unprovoked,
systematic, malignant neglect and abuse on any one point as the writer
of these short and simple annals on this. If there is one thing in the
whole range of human possibilities on which I pride myself, it is my
poetry. I cannot do much at prose. That requires a depth, an
equilibrium, a comprehension, a sagacity, a culture, which I do not
possess and cannot command. Nor in the domestic drudgery line, nor the
parlor ornament line, nor the social philanthropic line, nor the
ministering angel line, can I be said to have a determinate value. As
an investment, as an economic institution, as an available force, I
suppose I must be reckoned a failure; but I do write lovely poetry.
That I insist on: and yet, incredible as it may seem, of that one
little ewe lamb have I been repeatedly and remorselessly robbed by an
unscrupulous public, and a still more unscrupulous private. Whenever I
come into the room with a sheet of manuscript in my hand, Halicarnassus
glances at it, and if the lines are not all of the same length, he
finds at once that he has to go and shovel a path, or bank up the
cellar, or get in the wood, unless I have taken the precaution to lock
the door and put the key in my pocket. When, by force or fraud, I have
compelled a reluctant audience, he is sure to strike in by the time I
have got to the second stanza, breaking right into the middle of a
figure or a rapture, and asking how much more there is of it. I know of
few things better calculated to extinguish the poetic fire than this.
I regret to be obliged to say that Halicarnassus, by his persistent
hostility,--I believe I may say, persecution,--has disseminated his
plebeian prejudices over a very large portion of our joint community,
and my muse consequently is held in the smallest esteem. Not but that
whenever there is a church