Page:Letters to Various Persons.djvu/19

Rh to make mould for new harvests. I see the stanza rise around me, verse upon verse, far and near, like the mountains from Agiochook, not all having a terrestrial existence as yet, even as some of them may be clouds; but I fancy I see the gleam of some Sebago Lake and silver cascade, at whose well I may drink one day. I am as unfit for any practical purpose—I mean for the furtherance of the world's ends—as gossamer for ship-timber; and I, who am going to be a pencil-maker to-morrow, can sympathize with God Apollo, who served King Admetus for a while on earth. But I believe he found it for his advantage at last,—as I am sure I shall, though I shall hold the nobler part at least out of the service.

Don t attach any undue seriousness to this threnody, for I love my fate to the very core and rind, and could swallow it without paring it, I think. You ask if I have written any more poems? Excepting those which Vulcan is now forging, I have only discharged a few more bolts into the horizon, in all, three hundred verses, and sent them, as I may say, over the mountains to Miss Fuller, who may have occasion to remember the old rhyme,—

But these are far more Vandalic than they. In this narrow sheet there is not room even for one