“Well, did the editor print them, Uncle Frank?”

Hold on, my dear fellow.  You are quite too fast.  As I said, when the lines to somebody or something were sent to the editor, I was in a perfect fever.  I could hardly wait for Wednesday to come, the day on which the paper was to be issued—­the paper which was to be the medium of the first acquaintance of my muse with “a discerning public.”

“Well, how did you feel when the lines were printed?”

When they were printed!  Alas, for my fame! they were not printed at all.  The editor rejected them.  “Theodore’s lines,” said he—­the great clown! what did he know about poetry?—­“Theodore’s lines have gone to the shades.  They possessed some merit,”—­some merit! that’s all he knows about poetry; the brute!—­“but not enough to entitle them to a place.  Still, whenever age and experience have sufficiently developed his genius,”—­mark the smooth and oily manner in which the savage knocks a poor fellow down, and treads on his neck—­“whenever age and experience have sufficiently developed his genius, we shall be happy to hear from him again.”

If you can fancy how a man feels, when he is taken from an oven, pretty nearly hot enough to bake corn bread, and plunged into a very cold bath, indeed—­say about forty degrees Fahrenheit—­you can form some idea of my feelings when I read that paragraph in the editorial column, under the notice “To correspondents.”

I am inclined to think there are a great many little folks climbing up the stairs of the stage of life, who verily believe that genius has got them by the hand, leading them along, but who, in fact, are not a little mistaken.  It is rather important that one should know whether he has any genius or not; and if he has, in what particular direction he will be likely to distinguish himself.

I don’t believe in the old-fashioned notion that people all come into the world with minds and tastes so unlike, that, if you educate one ever so carefully, he never will make a poet, or a painter, or a musician, as the case may be; while the other will be a master in one of these branches, with scarcely any instruction.  But I do believe there is a great difference in natural capacities for a particular art; and that some persons learn that art easily, while others learn it with difficulty, and could, perhaps, never excel in it, if they should drive at it for a life-time.

Ralph Waldo, a boy who lived near our house, when I was a child, was the sport of all the neighborhood, on account of the high estimate in which he held his talent at drawing pictures.  Now it so happened that Ralph’s pictures, to say the least, were rather poor specimens of the art.  Some of them, according to the best of my recollection, would never have suggested the particular animal or thing for which they were made, if they had not been labeled, or if Ralph had not called them by name.