We laughed over this essay of the old Professor; though it hit us pretty hard. The best part of the joke is that the old man himself published a thin volume of poems when he was young, which there is good reason to think he is not very proud of, as they say he buys up all the copies he can find in the shops. No matter what they say, I can't help agreeing with him about this great flood of “poetry,” as it calls itself, and looking at the rhyming mania much as he does.
How I do love real poetry! That is the reason hate rhymes which have not a particle of it in them. The foolish scribblers that deal in them are like bad workmen in a carpenter's shop. They not only turn out bad jobs of work, but they spoil the tools for better workmen. There is hardly a pair of rhymes in the English language that is not so dulled and hacked and gapped by these 'prentice hands that a master of the craft hates to touch them, and yet he cannot very well do without them. I have not been besieged as the old Professor has been with such multitudes of would-be-poetical aspirants that he could not even read their manuscripts, but I have had a good many letters containing verses, and I have warned the writers of the delusion under which they were laboring.
You may like to know that I have just been translating some extracts from the Greek Anthology. I send you a few specimens of my work, with a Dedication to the Shade of Sappho. I hope you will find something of the Greek rhythm in my versions, and that I have caught a spark of inspiration from the impassioned Lesbian. I have found great delight in this work, at any rate, and am never so happy as when I read from my manuscript or repeat from memory the lines into which I have transferred the thought of the men and women of two thousand years ago, or given rhythmical expression to my own rapturous feelings with regard to them. I must read you my Dedication to the Shade of Sappho. I cannot help thinking that you will like it better than either of my last two, The Song of the Roses, or The Wail of the Weeds.
How I do miss you, dearest! I want you: I want you to listen to what I have written; I want you to hear all about my plans for the future; I want to look at you, and think how grand it must be to feel one's self to be such a noble and beautiful-creature; I want to wander in the woods with you, to float on the lake, to share your life and talk over every day's doings with you. Alas! I feel that we have parted as two friends part at a port of embarkation: they embrace, they kiss each other's cheeks, they cover their faces and weep, they try to speak good-by to each other, they watch from the pier and from the deck; the two forms grow less and less, fainter and fainter in the distance, two white handkerchiefs flutter once and again, and yet once more, and the last visible link of the chain which binds them has parted. Dear, dear, dearest Euthymia, my eyes are running over with tears when I think that we may never, never meet again.