Shall a man who in his younger days has written poetry, or what passed for it, continue to attempt it in his later years?  Certainly, if it amuses or interests him, no one would object to his writing in verse as much as he likes.  Whether he should continue to write for the public is another question.  Poetry is a good deal a matter of heart-beats, and the circulation is more languid in the later period of life.  The joints are less supple; the arteries are more or less “ossified.”  Something like these changes has taken place in the mind.  It has lost the flexibility, the plastic docility, which it had in youth and early manhood, when the gristle had but just become hardened into bone.  It is the nature of poetry to writhe itself along through the tangled growths of the vocabulary, as a snake winds through the grass, in sinuous, complex, and unexpected curves, which crack every joint that is not supple as india-rubber.

I had a poem that I wanted to print just here.  But after what I have this moment said, I hesitated, thinking that I might provoke the obvious remark that I exemplified the unfitness of which I had been speaking.  I remembered the advice I had given to a poetical aspirant not long since, which I think deserves a paragraph to itself.

My friend, I said, I hope you will not write in verse.  When you write in prose you say what you mean.  When you write in rhyme you say what you must.

Should I send this poem to the publishers, or not?

   “Some said, ‘John, print it;’ others said, ‘Not so.’”

I did not ask “some” or “others.”  Perhaps I should have thought it best to keep my poem to myself and the few friends for whom it was written.  All at once, my daimon—­that other Me over whom I button my waistcoat when I button it over my own person—­put it into my head to look up the story of Madame Saqui.  She was a famous danseuse, who danced Napoleon in and out, and several other dynasties besides.  Her last appearance was at the age of seventy-six, which is rather late in life for the tight rope, one of her specialties.  Jules Janin mummified her when she died in 1866, at the age of eighty.  He spiced her up in his eulogy as if she had been the queen of a modern Pharaoh.  His foamy and flowery rhetoric put me into such a state of good-nature that I said, I will print my poem, and let the critical Gil Blas handle it as he did the archbishop’s sermon, or would have done, if he had been a writer for the “Salamanca Weekly.”

It must be premised that a very beautiful loving cup was presented to me on my recent birthday, by eleven ladies of my acquaintance.  This was the most costly and notable of all the many tributes I received, and for which in different forms I expressed my gratitude.

          Tothe eleven ladies

   Who presented me with A silver loving cup on the
     twenty-ninth of august, M DCCC LXXXIX.