BLE.

EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL.

A lyric conception--my friend, the Poet, said--hits me like a bullet in
the forehead. I have often had the blood drop from my cheeks when it
struck, and felt that I turned as white as death. Then comes a creeping
as of centipedes running down the spine,--then a gasp and a great jump
of the heart,--then a sudden flush and a beating in the vessels of the
head,--then a long sigh,--and the poem is written.

It is an impromptu, I suppose, then, if you write it so suddenly,--I
replied.

No,--said he,--far from it. I said written, but I did not say _copied_.
Every such poem has a soul and a body, and it is the body of it, or the
copy, that men read and publishers pay for. The soul of it is born in an
instant in the poet's soul. It comes to him a thought, tangled in the
meshes of a few sweet words,--words that have loved each other from the
cradle of the language, but have never been wedded until now. Whether it
will ever fully embody itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or
not is uncertain; but it exists potentially from the instant that the
poet turns pale with it. It is enough to stun and scare anybody, to have
a hot thought come crashing into his brain, and ploughing up those
parallel ruts where the wagon trains of common ideas were jogging along
in their regular sequences of association. No wonder the ancients made
the poetical impulse wholly external. [Greek: Maenin aeide, Thea],
Goddess,--Muse,--divine afflatus,--something outside always. _I_ never
wrote any verses worth reading. I can't. I am too stupid. If I ever
copied any that were worth reading, I was only a medium.

[I was talking all this time to our boarders, you understand,--telling
them what this poet told me. The company listened rather attentively, I
thought, considering the literary character of the remarks.]

The old gentleman opposite all at once asked me if I ever read anything
better than Pope's "Essay on Man"? Had I ever perused McFingal? He was
fond of poetry when he was a boy,--his mother taught him to say many
little pieces,--he remembered one beautiful hymn;--and the old gentleman
began, in a clear, loud voice, for his years,--

"The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens,"----

He stopped, as if startled by our silence, and a faint flush ran up
beneath the thin white hairs that fell upon his cheek. As I looked
round, I was reminded of a show I once