Page 118 - Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor

he could have wished; and he afterwards worked with desperate energy to
recover those lost poetic opportunities.

Yet in his busiest days he was always writing verses, which in the minds of

excellent judges are the best he ever did. From time to time he published
volumes of poetry, and with certain of his intimate friends he always
maintained himself on the footing of a poet.

We remember the publication of his first volume, entitled "Ximena," which

he never cared to reprint in his collected works. During his first European
trip he wrote a great deal. Some of his shorter poems he afterwards
published under the title "Rhymes of Travel." The fate of a longer poem we

must hear in his own words.

"I had in my knapsack," he says, "a manuscript poem of some twelve
hundred lines, called 'The Liberated Titan,'--the idea of which I fancied to
be something entirely new in literature. Perhaps it was. I did not doubt for a

moment that any London publisher would gladly accept it, and I imagined
that its appearance would create not a little sensation. Mr. Murray gave the

poem to his literary adviser, who kept it about a month, and then returned it
with a polite message. I was advised to try Moxon; but, by this time, I had
sobered down considerably, and did not wish to risk a second rejection.

"I therefore solaced myself by reading the immortal poem at night, in my

bare chamber, looking occasionally down into the graveyard, and thinking
of mute, inglorious Miltons.

"The curious reader may ask how I escaped the catastrophe of publishing
the poem at last. That is a piece of good fortune for which I am indebted to

the Rev. Dr. Bushnell, of Hartford. We were fellow-passengers on board
the same ship to America, a few weeks later, and I had sufficient
confidence in his taste to show him the poem. His verdict was charitable;

but he asserted that no poem of that length should be given to the world
before it had received the most thorough study and finish--and exacted

from me a promise not to publish it within a year. At the end of that time I
renewed the promise to myself for a thousand years."