that seized me, at seeing a duck made drunk by eating rum-cherries.  I turned my back on the window.  Another hour followed, then another, and another:  I was still as far from poetry as ever; every object about me seemed bent against my abstraction; the card-racks fascinating me like serpents, and compelling me to read, as if I would get them by heart, “Dr. Joblin,” “Mr. Cumberback,” “Mr. Milton Bull,” &c. &c.  I took up my pen, drew a sheet of paper from my writing-desk, and fixed my eyes upon that;—­’t was all in vain; I saw nothing on it but the watermark, D.  Ames.  I laid down the pen, closed my eyes, and threw my head back in the chair.  “Are you waiting to be shaved, Sir?” said a familiar voice.  I started up, and overturned my servant.  “No, blockhead!”—­“I am waiting to be inspired";—­but this I added mentally.  What is the cause of my difficulty? said I. Something within me seemed to reply, in the words of Lear, “Nothing comes of nothing.”  Then I must seek a subject.  I ran over a dozen in a few minutes, chose one after another, and, though twenty thoughts very readily occurred on each, I was fain to reject them all; some for wanting pith, some for belonging to prose, and others for having been worn out in the service of other poets.  In a word, my eyes began to open on the truth, and I felt convinced that that only was poetry which a man writes because he cannot help writing; the irrepressible effluence of his secret being on every thing in sympathy with it,—­a kind of flowering of the soul amid the warmth and the light of nature.  I am no poet, I exclaimed, and I will not disfigure Mr. Ames with commonplace verses.

I know not how I should have borne this second disappointment, had not the title of a new Novel, which then came into my head, suggested a trial in that branch of letters.  I will write a Novel.  Having come to this determination, the next thing was to collect materials.  They must be sought after, said I, for my late experiment has satisfied me that I might wait for ever in my elbow-chair, and they would never come to me; they must be toiled for,—­not in books, if I would not deal in second-hand,—­but in the world, that inexhaustible storehouse of all kinds of originals.  I then turned over in my mind the various characters I had met with in life; amongst these a few only seemed fitted for any story, and those rather as accessories; such as a politician who hated popularity, a sentimental grave-digger, and a metaphysical rope-dancer; but for a hero, the grand nucleus of my fable, I was sorely at a loss.  This, however, did not discourage me.  I knew he might be found in the world, if I would only take the trouble to look for him.  For this purpose I jumped into the first stage-coach that passed my door; it was immaterial whither bound, my object being men, not places.  My first day’s journey offered nothing better than a sailor who rebuked a member of Congress for swearing.  But at the third