Yet in his busiest days he was always writing verses, which in the minds of excellent judges are the best he ever did.  From time to time he published volumes of poetry, and with certain of his intimate friends he always maintained himself on the footing of a poet.

We remember the publication of his first volume, entitled “Ximena,” which he never cared to reprint in his collected works.  During his first European trip he wrote a great deal.  Some of his shorter poems he afterwards published under the title “Rhymes of Travel.”  The fate of a longer poem we must hear in his own words.

“I had in my knapsack,” he says, “a manuscript poem of some twelve hundred lines, called ’The Liberated Titan,’—­the idea of which I fancied to be something entirely new in literature.  Perhaps it was.  I did not doubt for a moment that any London publisher would gladly accept it, and I imagined that its appearance would create not a little sensation.  Mr. Murray gave the poem to his literary adviser, who kept it about a month, and then returned it with a polite message.  I was advised to try Moxon; but, by this time, I had sobered down considerably, and did not wish to risk a second rejection.

“I therefore solaced myself by reading the immortal poem at night, in my bare chamber, looking occasionally down into the graveyard, and thinking of mute, inglorious Miltons.

“The curious reader may ask how I escaped the catastrophe of publishing the poem at last.  That is a piece of good fortune for which I am indebted to the Rev. Dr. Bushnell, of Hartford.  We were fellow-passengers on board the same ship to America, a few weeks later, and I had sufficient confidence in his taste to show him the poem.  His verdict was charitable; but he asserted that no poem of that length should be given to the world before it had received the most thorough study and finish—­and exacted from me a promise not to publish it within a year.  At the end of that time I renewed the promise to myself for a thousand years.”

Of other poems written at that time he thought better.  In the preface to his volume he says of them,—­“They are faithful records of my feelings at the time, often noted down hastily by the wayside, and aspiring to no higher place than the memory of some pilgrim who may, under like circumstances, look upon the same scenes.  An ivy leaf from a tower where a hero of old history may have dwelt, or the simplest weed growing over the dust that once held a great soul, is reverently kept for memories it inherited through the chance fortune of the wind-sown seed; and I would fain hope that these rhymes may bear with them a like simple claim to reception, from those who have given me their company through the story of my wanderings.”