When the notes were as brief as the foregoing samples, the pain was not so severe as in the last which Elsie received, in which a careful but most cutting criticism accompanied the refusal.  There is no doubt that Elsie’s poems were crude, but she had both fancy and feeling.  With more knowledge of life and more time, she was capable of producing something really worth reading and publishing.  If there had been no talent in her verses, she would not have had a reading from so many good publishing houses; but she did not know enough of the trade to know this, and her humiliation at her repeated disappointments was exceedingly bitter.

There is no species of composition that should be less hurried than poetry.  Even if it is struck off in a moment of inspiration, it should not be published then, but laid aside for alteration and polishing after a considerable time has elapsed; and much of our best poetry has been very slowly composed, even at first.  Our poor little Elsie had prepared by great industry her volume of poems in less than four months, and had not taken time to reconsider them.  They were not narrative pieces, in which the interest of the story carries you along in reading, whether the diction is perfected or not, but mostly short lyrical poems, and contemplative pieces, which are always much more effective when found amongst other descriptions of poetry or in a magazine, than when collected together in a volume.  They were generally sad, a common fault with poetesses; but poor Elsie had more excuse for taking that tone than many others who have done so.

She had to mourn the loss of fortune and the coldness of friends; the conduct of William Dalzell to her sister had made a deeper impression on her mind than on that of Jane.  She had more capacity of suffering than Jane had, and when she took the pen in her hand, she felt that her life—­and all life—­was full of sorrow.  Jane had induced Elsie to accompany her to the chapel, where she herself had learned her first lesson of submission and of Christian hope; but even in religion Elsie inclined to the contemplative and the tender rather than to the active and the cheerful side of it.  She looked with far more intense longing to the Heaven beyond the earth than Jane did, and had not the interest in the things about her to make the dreariness of her daily life endurable.  Her poetry had been her one resource; and that appeared to be very weak and contemptible in the opinion of those who ought to know.

Whether the literary taster for the publisher last applied to was less engrossed with business than the others, or whether he thought it would do the aspiring poetess good to show her her faults, I cannot tell, but he wrote a long letter of critical remarks.  There was one ballad—­an idealization of the incident in Jane’s life which had so much impressed Elsie, in which William Dalzell was made more fascinating and more faithless, and Jane much more attached to him than in reality—­which