upon it or curled over it; all eyes should be kept away from the skies, in spite of os homini sublime dedit; youth should be coupled with all the virtues except truth; earth should never be reminded of her birth; death should never be allowed to stop a mortal’s breath, nor the bell to sound his knell, nor flowers from blossoming bowers to wave over his grave or show their bloom upon his tomb.  We have rhyming dictionaries,—­let us have one from which all rhymes are rigorously excluded.  The sight of a poor creature grubbing for rhymes to fill up his sonnet, or to cram one of those voracious, rhyme-swallowing rigmaroles which some of our drudging poetical operatives have been exhausting themselves of late to satiate with jingles, makes my head ache and my stomach rebel.  Work, work of some kind, is the business of men and women, not the making of jingles!  No,—­no,—­no!  I want to see the young people in our schools and academies and colleges, and the graduates of these institutions, lifted up out of the little Dismal Swamp of self-contemplating and self-indulging and self-commiserating emotionalism which is surfeiting the land with those literary sandwiches,—­thin slices of tinkling sentimentality between two covers looking like hard-baked gilt gingerbread.  But what faces these young folks make up at my good advice!  They get tipsy on their rhymes.  Nothing intoxicates one like his—­or her—­own verses, and they hold on to their metre-ballad-mongering as the fellows that inhale nitrous oxide hold on to the gas-bag.”

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.