no poet, and we don't want poetry. Our civilization isn't old enough.
Poets, like other maggots, will be produced when fermentation comes.
I am going about the humdrum and the useful. I am about as low in
the public estimation as I can well go; at any rate I am down on hard
land, which will be a good starting-point. Now don't go off and become
sanguine over me, nor trouble yourself much about me.

"'The world will find me after many a day,' as Southey says of one of
his books. I doubt if it ever did. The Doctor contends that Southey
was a poet; but then he thinks I am, also!

"What a deuce of a clamor is made about this new comet or planet! What
a useful thing to us poor, mud-stranded mortals to find out that there
is another little fragment of a world, away some hundreds of
millions of miles, outside of no particular where--for I believe
this astronomical detective is only on its track! The Doctor is in
ecstacies over it, takes it as a special personal favor, and declaims
luminously and constellationally about writing one's name among the
stars, like that frisky cow who, in jumping over the moon, upon a
time, made the milky way. I've always had some doubts about that
exploit; but then there is the mark she left. Your friend Roberts
is uneasy about this new star business; he is afraid that it will
unsettle the cheese market, and he don't know about it, nor do I.

"There! I got home only last night, and haven't heard any news to
write you. Some time I will tell of two or three things I saw and
heard, and about some of our cousins, who regard us as belonging to
the outer and lower skirts of the race. If I am to be one end of a
family, let it be the beginning.