or that, and many more pretty, patient maids.  I wanted to read my favorite passages, my favorite poems to them; I am afraid I often did read, when they would rather have been talking; in the case of the poems I did worse, I repeated them.  This seems rather incredible now, but it is true enough, and absurd as it is, it at least attests my sincerity.  It was long before I cured myself of so pestilent a habit; and I am not yet so perfectly well of it that I could be safely trusted with a fascinating book and a submissive listener.  I dare say I could not have been made to understand at this time that Tennyson was not so nearly the first interest of life with other people as he was with me; I must often have suspected it, but I was helpless against the wish to make them feel him as important to their prosperity and well-being as he was to mine.  My head was full of him; his words were always behind my lips; and when I was not repeating his phrase to myself or to some one else, I was trying to frame something of my own as like him as I could.  It was a time of melancholy from ill-health, and of anxiety for the future in which I must make my own place in the world.  Work, and hard work, I had always been used to and never afraid of; but work is by no means the whole story.  You may get on without much of it, or you may do a great deal, and not get on.  I was willing to do as much of it as I could get to do, but I distrusted my health, somewhat, and I had many forebodings, which my adored poet helped me to transfigure to the substance of literature, or enabled me for the time to forget.  I was already imitating him in the verse I wrote; he now seemed the only worthy model for one who meant to be as great a poet as I did.  None of the authors whom I read at all displaced him in my devotion, and I could not have believed that any other poet would ever be so much to me.  In fact, as I have expressed, none ever has been.

XXIV.  HEINE

That winter passed very quickly and happily for me, and at the end of the legislative session I had acquitted myself so much to the satisfaction of one of the newspapers which I wrote for that I was offered a place on it.  I was asked to be city editor, as it was called in that day, and I was to have charge of the local reporting.  It was a great temptation, and for a while I thought it the greatest piece of good fortune.  I went down to Cincinnati to acquaint myself with the details of the work, and to fit myself for it by beginning as reporter myself.  One night’s round of the police stations with the other reporters satisfied me that I was not meant for that work, and I attempted it no farther.  I have often been sorry since, for it would have made known to me many phases of life that I have always remained ignorant of, but I did not know then that life was supremely interesting and important.  I fancied that literature, that poetry was so; and it was humiliation and anguish indescribable