it repeat with murderous iteration, "Ret-ri-bu-tion," varied
occasionally, under some new access of pain, with other
utterances. Though ordinarily so little endowed with the poetic gift
as never to have attempted to write a line of verse, yet at this time,
and for a few days previous, I had experienced a strange development
of the rhythmical faculty, and on this particular occasion I made
verses, such as they were, with incredible ease and rapidity. I
remember being greatly troubled by the necessity for a popular
national hymn, and manufactured several with extempore rapidity. Had
their merit at all corresponded with the frightful facility with which
they were composed, they would have won universal popularity.
Unfortunately, the effusions were never written down, and can
not, therefore, be added to that immense mass of trash which
demonstrates the still possible advent of a true American
_Marseillaise_.

With these tasks accomplished, and with a suspicion that the allotted
hours must have long expired, I would yet remind myself that I was in
a condition to exaggerate the lapse of time; and then, to give myself
every assurance of fidelity to my purpose, I would start off on a new
term of endurance. I seemed to myself to have borne the penance for
hours, to have made myself a shining example of what a resolute will
can do under circumstances the most inauspicious. At length, when
certain that the time must have much more than expired, and with no
little elation over the happy result of the experiment, I looked up to
the clock and found it to be just three minutes past one! Little as
the mind had really accomplished, the sense of its activity in these
few minutes had been tremendous. Measuring time by the conscious
succession of ideas may, if I may say it parenthetically, be no more
than the same infirmity of our limited human faculties which just now