He himself said that he had no
very great love for written poetry: had he a poetic mind? He loved the
beautiful in life: he loved symmetry in form, he loved harmony in color,
he loved good music. And yet, though he had read the English-writing
poets, he seemed to care less for their work than for anything else in
literature. The thought of this inconsistency has perplexed me whenever
I have thought of it through all these years. As I have intimated, he
was charmed by the beautiful, and by every known expression of beauty;
but for the strictly metrical in language-expression, he evinced almost
a distaste. I have often thought that he had, through some peculiar
circumstance in his earlier life, acquired a suggestive dislike to the
very form of verse. To this peculiarity there was, however, exception,
to which I am about to allude.
By the time we had smoked out a cigar apiece, we were exchanging views
and comments on such writers, English and American, as came to mind. One
of the books that lay on my table was a copy of Byron; though most of
the others were the works of American authors--Hawthorne, Irving,
Longfellow, Poe, and one or two others. He had picked up my Byron, and
glancing at it had remarked that if all the poets were like Byron he
would devote more time than he did to the reading of verse.
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