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LOWELL used to find food for great mirth in General George P. Morris’s line,

“Her heart and morning broke together.”

Lowell’s well-beloved Dr. Donne, however, had an attack of the same platitude, and possibly inoculated poor Morris. Even literature seems to have its mischief-making bacilli. The late “incomparable and ingenious Dean of St. Paul’s” says,

“The day breaks not, it is my heart.”

I think Dr. Donne’s case rather worse than Morris’s. Chaucer had the malady in a milder form when he wrote:

“Up roos the sonne, and up roos Emelye.”

The charming naivete of it!

SITTING in Ellen Terry’s dressing-room at the Lyceum Theatre one evening during that lady’s temporary absence on the stage, Sarah Bernhardt picked up a crayon and wrote this pretty word on the mirror–Dearling, mistaking it for the word darling. The French actress lighted by chance upon a Spenserianism now become obsolete without good reason. It is a more charming adjective than the one that has replaced it.

A DEAD author appears to be bereft of all earthly rights. He is scarcely buried before old magazines and newspapers are ransacked in search of matters which, for reasons sufficient to him, he had carefully excluded from the definitive edition of his collected writings.

He gave the people of his best;
His worst he kept, his best he gave.

One can imagine a poet tempted to address some such appeal as this to any possible future publisher of his poems:

Take what thou wilt, a lyric or a line,
Take all, take nothing–and God send thee cheer!
But my anathema on thee and thine
If thou add’st aught to what is printed here.

THE claim of this country to call itself “The Land of the Free” must be held in abeyance until every man in it, whether he belongs or does not belong to a labor organization, shall have the right to work for his daily bread.

THERE is a strain of primitive poetry running through the entire Irish race, a fleeting lyrical emotion which expresses itself in a flash, usually in connection with love of country and kindred across the sea. I had a touching illustration of it the other morning. The despot who reigns over our kitchen was gathering a mess of dandelions on the rear lawn. It was one of those blue and gold days which seem especially to belong New England. “It’s in County Westmeath I ‘d be this day,” she said, looking up at me. “I’d go cool my hands in the grass on my ould mother’s grave in the bit of churchyard foreninst the priest’s house at Mullingar.”I have seen poorer poetry than that in the magazines.

SPEAKING of the late Major Pond, the well-known director of a lecture bureau, an old client of his remarked: “He was a most capable manager, but it always made me a little sore to have him deduct twenty-five per cent. commission.” “Pond’s Extract,” murmured one of the gentlemen present.

EACH of our great towns has its “Little Italy,” with shops where nothing is spoken but Italian and streets in which the alien pedestrian had better not linger after nightfall. The chief industry of these exotic communities seems to be spaghetti and stilettos. What with our Little Italys and Chinatowns, and the like, an American need not cross the ocean in order to visit foreign lands and enjoy the benefits of older civilizations.

POETS are made as well as born, the proverb notwithstanding. They are made possible by the general love of poetry and the consequent imperious demand for it. When this is nonexistent, poets become mute, the atmosphere stifles them. There would have been no Shakespeare had there been no Elizabethan audience. That was an age when, as Emerson finely puts it,

Men became
Poets, for the air was fame.

THE stolid gentleman in livery who has his carriage-stand at the corner opposite my house is constantly touching on the extremes of human experience, with probably not the remotest perception of the fact. Now he takes a pair of lovers out for an airing, and now he drives the absconding bank-teller to the railway-station. Excepting as question of distance, the man has positively no choice between a theatre and a graveyard. I met him this morning dashing up to the portals of Trinity Church with a bridal party, and this afternoon, as I was crossing Cambridge Bridge, I saw him creeping along next to the hearse, on his way to Mount Auburn. The wedding afforded him no pleasure, and the funeral gave him no grief; yet he was a factor in both. It is his odd destiny to be wholly detached from the vital part of his own acts. If the carriage itself could speak! The autobiography of a public hack written without reservation would be dramatic reading.

IN this blotted memorandum-book are a score or two of suggestions for essays, sketches, and poems, which I have not written, and never shall write. The instant I jot down an idea the desire to utilize it leaves me, and I turn away to do something unpremeditated. The shabby volume has become a sort of Potter’s Field where I bury my literary intentions, good and bad, without any belief in their final resurrection.

A STAGE DIRECTION: exit time; enter Eternity–with a soliloquy.