I

Herbert exclaimed, as we sat by the fire one evening, that he wished he hadturned his attention to writing poetry like Tennyson's.

The remark was not whimsical, but satirical. Tennyson is a man oftalent, who happened to strike a lucky vein, which he has worked withcleverness. The adventurer with a pickaxe in Washoe may happen uponlike good fortune. The world is full of poetry as the earth is of"pay-dirt;" one only needs to know how to "strike" it. An able mancan make himself almost anything that he will. It is melancholy tothink how many epic poets have been lost in the tea-trade, how manydramatists (though the age of the drama has passed) have wasted theirgenius in great mercantile and mechanical enterprises. I know a manwho might have been the poet, the essayist, maybe the critic, ofthis country, who chose to become a country judge, to sit day afterday upon a bench in an obscure corner of the world, listening towrangling lawyers and prevaricating witnesses, preferring to judgehis fellow-men rather than enlighten them.