A Story of Three Poems

I wrote in the last sketch but one of the villager with a literary gift
who composes the epitaphs in rhyme of his neighbours when they pass
away and are buried in the churchyard. This has served to remind me of
a kindred subject--the poetry or verse (my own included) of those who
are not poets by profession: also of an incident. Undoubtedly there is
a vast difference between the village rhymester and the true poet, and
the poetry I am now concerned with may be said to come somewhat between
these two extremes. Or to describe it in metaphor, it may be said to
come midway between the crow of the "tame villatic fowl" and the music
of the nightingale in the neighbouring copse or of the skylark singing
at heaven's gate. The impartial reader may say at the finish that the
incident was not worth relating. Are there any such readers? I doubt
it. I take it that we all, even those who appear the most matter-of-
fact in their minds and lives, have something of the root, the
elements, of poetry in their composition. How should it be otherwise,
seeing that we are all creatures of like passions, all in some degree
dreamers of dreams; and as we all possess the faculty of memory we must
at times experience emotions recollected in tranquillity. And that, our
masters have told us, is poetry.

It is hardly necessary to say that it is nothing of the sort: it is the
elements, the essence, the feeling which makes poetry if expressed. I
have a passion for music, a perpetual desire to express myself in
music, but as I can't sing and can't perform on any musical instrument,
I can't call myself a musician. The poetic feeling that is in us and
cannot be expressed remains a secret untold, a warmth in the heart, a
rapture which cannot be communicated. But it cries to be told, and in
some rare instances the desire overcomes the difficulty: in a happy
moment the unknown language is captured as by a miracle and the secret
comes out.

And, as a rule, when it has been expressed it is put in the fire, or
locked up in a desk. By-and-by the hidden poem will be taken out and
read with a blush. For how could he, a practical-minded man, with a
wholesome contempt for the small scribblers and people weak in their
intellectuals generally, have imagined himself a poet and produced this
pitiful stuff!

Then, too, there are others who blush, but with pleasure, at the
thought that, without being poets, they have written something out of
their own heads which, to them at all events, reads just like poetry.
Some of these little poems find their way into an editor's hands, to be
looked at and thrown aside in most cases, but occasionally one wins a
place in some periodical, and my story relates to one of these chosen
products--or