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Matson was a pious young man of sterling integrity, while the others were more lax in their religious opinions and principles. All were sensible young men, much above the average of this class in intellectual endowments. Osborne and Ralph were imaginative and poetical, and frequently tried their talents at verse-making.
Franklin showed to verse-making put a damper upon Benjamin's poetical aspirations. The air-castle that his youthful imagination had built, in consequence of the rapid sale of his literary wares, tumbled to ruin at once. He went back to the office and his work quite crest-fallen. "What has happened now?" inquired James, noticing that Benjamin looked somewhat less smiling.
And when I collect my verses into books, I am altogether uncertain whether to took upon myself as a man building a monument, or burying the dead. It sometimes seems to me that each publication is but a solemn funeral of many wasted years. For I have given all to the verse-making.
The verses never come to much; but they leave their stamp behind them; and the man is all the better in the end for having thus taught himself the restraint, the command of language, the careful choice of expressions, the exercise of deliberate pains in composition, which even bad verse-making necessarily implies.
Wagner is never driving at anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his plays is driving at such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets, triolets, and the like. And this is why he is so easy for the natural musician who has had no academic teaching. The professors, when Wagner's music is played to them, exclaim at once "What is this? Is it aria, or recitative?
The possession of a fine gown was the important thing. As to how it made them look, they had not imagination enough to consider that. She possessed, however, another faculty on which she prided herself far more, her ignorance and vanity causing her to mistake it for a grand accomplishment the faculty of verse-making.
His later years brought him some additional skill in polishing his lines and a riper human wisdom, but his native verse-making talent is as completely revealed in "Old Ironsides," published when he was twenty-one, and in "The Last Leaf," composed a year or two later, as in anything he was to write during the next half-century.
Besides in these old times people worked in a different sort of way from now. We must remember that the art of song went hand in hand with the art of verse-making.
"When up the armed mountains of Dunbar He marched, and through deep Severn, ending war." "Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse Shall the English soldier, ere he charge, rehearse." On the whole, one is glad that Dryden's panegyric on the Protector was so poor. It was purely official verse-making. Had there been any feeling in it, there had been baseness in his address to Charles.
"True; and that thought is poetic enough to make me remind you that I favoured you with the maiden specimen of my verse-making on condition that you repaid me by a specimen of your own practical skill in the art. And I claim the right to suggest the theme. Let it be " "Of a beefsteak?" "Tush, you have worn out that tasteless joke at my expense.
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