the newspapers and published a Don Juanic poem called _Fanny_, is
defunct as a poet, though averred to be exemplifying the
metempsychosis as a man of business. Somewhat later there was
Whittier, a fiery Quaker youth, to whom the muse had perversely
assigned a battle-trumpet, and who got himself lynched, ten years
agone, in South Carolina. I remember, too, a lad just from college,
Longfellow by name, who scattered some delicate verses to the winds,
and went to Germany, and perished, I think, of intense application,
at the University of Gottingen. Willis--what a pity!--was lost, if
I recollect rightly, in 1833, on his voyage to Europe, whither he
was going to give us sketches of the world's sunny face. If these
had lived, they might, one or all of them, have grown to be famous
men.

And yet there is no telling: it may be as well that they have died.
I was myself a young man of promise. O shattered brain, O broken
spirit, where is the fulfilment of that promise? The sad truth is,
that, when fate would gently disappoint the world, it takes away the
hopefulest mortals in their youth; when it would laugh the world's
hopes to scorn, it lets them live. Let me die upon this apothegm,
for I shall never make a truer one.

What a strange substance is the human brain! Or rather,--for there
is no need of generalizing the remark,--what an odd brain is mine!
Would you believe it? Daily and nightly there come scraps of poetry
humming in my intellectual ear--some as airy as birdnotes, and some
as delicately neat as parlor-music, and a few as grand as organ-
peals--that seem just such verses as those departed poets would have
written had not an inexorable destiny snatched them from their
inkstands. They visit me in spirit, perhaps desiring to engage my