We wrote ten or fifteen verses ourselves once.

Had we not written them just then and there, we might not be here.

They were in long metre, and "Old Hundred" would have fitted them grandly.
Many people are seized with the poetic spasm when they are sick, and their lines are apt to begin with.
"O mortality! how frail art thou!" Others on Sabbath afternoons write Sabbath-school hymns, adding to the batch of infinite nonsense that the children are compelled to swallow.

For others a beautiful curl is a corkscrew pulling out canto after canto.
Nine-tenths of the rhyme that comes to a printing office cannot be used.
You hear a rough tear of paper, and you look around to see the managing editor adding to the responsibilities of his chip-basket.

What a way that is to treat incipient Tennysons and Longfellows! Next to the poetic effusions tumble out treatises on "constitutional law" heavy enough to break the basket.