It is just so with writing in verse.  It was not understood that everybody can learn to make poetry, just as they can learn the more difficult tricks of juggling.  M. Jourdain’s discovery that he had been speaking and writing prose all his life is nothing to that of the man who finds out in middle life, or even later, that he might have been writing poetry all his days, if he had only known how perfectly easy and simple it is.  Not everybody, it is true, has a sufficiently good ear, a sufficient knowledge of rhymes and capacity for handling them, to be what is called a poet.  I doubt whether more than nine out of ten, in the average, have that combination of gifts required for the writing of readable verse.

This last expression of opinion created a sensation among The Teacups.  They looked puzzled for a minute.  One whispered to the next Teacup, “More than nine out of ten!  I should think that was a pretty liberal allowance.”

Yes, I continued; perhaps ninety-nine in a hundred would come nearer to the mark.  I have sometimes thought I might consider it worth while to set up a school for instruction in the art.  “Poetry taught in twelve lessons.”  Congenital idiocy is no disqualification.  Anybody can write “poetry.”  It is a most unenviable distinction to leave published a thin volume of verse, which nobody wanted, nobody buys, nobody reads, nobody cares for except the author, who cries over its pathos, poor fellow, and revels in its beauties, which he has all to himself.  Come! who will be my pupils in a Course,—­Poetry taught in twelve lessons?  That made a laugh, in which most of The Teacups, myself included, joined heartily.  Through it all I heard the sweet tones of Number Five’s caressing voice; not because it was more penetrating or louder than the others, for it was low and soft, but it was so different from the others, there was so much more life,—­the life of sweet womanhood,—­dissolved in it.

(Of course he will fall in love with her.  “He?  Who?” Why, the newcomer, the Counsellor.  Did I not see his eyes turn toward her as the silvery notes rippled from her throat?  Did they not follow her in her movements, as she turned her tread this or that way?

—­What nonsense for me to be arranging matters between two people strangers to each other before to-day!)

“A fellow writes in verse when he has nothing to say, and feels too dull and silly to say it in prose,” said Number Seven.

This made us laugh again, good-naturedly.  I was pleased with a kind of truth which it seemed to me to wrap up in its rather startling affirmation.  I gave a piece of advice the other day which I said I thought deserved a paragraph to itself.  It was from a letter I wrote not long ago to an unknown young correspondent, who had a longing for seeing himself in verse but was not hopelessly infatuated with the idea that he was born a “poet.”  “When you write in prose,” I said, “you say what you mean.  When you write in verse you