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 saw at the Museum,—­the Sleeping Beauty, I think they called it.  The old man’s sudden breaking out in this way turned every face towards him, and each kept his posture as if changed to stone.  Our Celtic Bridget, or Biddy, is not a foolish fat scullion to burst out crying for a sentiment.  She is of the serviceable, red-handed, broad-and-high-shouldered type; one of those imported female servants who are known in public by their amorphous