Now I tell you a poem must be kept and used, like a meerschaum, or a violin.  A poem is just as porous as the meerschaum;—­the more porous it is, the better.  I mean to say that a genuine poem is capable of absorbing an indefinite amount of the essence of our own humanity,—­its tenderness, its heroism, its regrets, its aspirations, so as to be gradually stained through with a divine secondary color derived from ourselves.  So you see it must take time to bring the sentiment of a poem into harmony with our nature, by staining ourselves through every thought and image our being can penetrate.

Then again as to the mere music of a new poem; why, who can expect anything more from that than from the music of a violin fresh from the maker’s hands?  Now you know very well that there are no less than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin.  These pieces are strangers to each other, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly acquainted.  At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule that had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere.  Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or a hundred more gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant.

Don’t you see that all this is just as true of a poem?  Counting each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin.  The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they don’t understand it at first.  But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind’s muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world’s crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric.  Observe, too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin.  Here is a Tyrolese fiddle that is just coming to its hundredth birthday,—­(Pedro Klauss, Tyroli, fecit, 1760,)—­the sap is pretty well out of it.  And here is the song of an old poet whom Neaera cheated:—­

  “Nox erat, et coelo fulgebat Luna sereno
       Inter minora sidera,
  Cum tu magnorum numen laesura deorum
       In verba jurubas mea.”

Don’t you perceive the sonorousness of these old dead Latin phrases?  Now I tell you that every word fresh from the dictionary brings with it a certain succulence; and though I cannot expect the sheets of the “Pactolian,” in which, as I told you, I sometimes print my verses, to get so dry as the crisp papyrus that held those words of Horatius Flaccus, yet you may be sure, that, while the sheets are damp, and while the lines hold their sap, you can’t fairly judge of my performances, and that, if made of the true stuff, they will ring better after a while.