ed his eyebrows very slightly, remembering that some
had called Spenser the poet's poet. "What a pity," he said to himself,
"that this Gifted Hopkins has n't got the brains of that William Murray
Bradshaw! What's the reason, I wonder, that all the little earthen pots
blow their covers off and froth over in rhymes at such a great rate,
while the big iron pots keep their lids on, and do all their simmering
inside?"

That is the way these old pedants will talk, after all their youth and
all their poetry, if they ever had any, are gone. The smiles of woman,
in the mean time, encouraged the young poet to smite the lyre. Fame
beckoned him upward from her templed steep. The rhymes which rose before
him unbidden were as the rounds of Jacob's ladder, on which he would
climb to a heaven of-glory.

Master Gridley threw cold water on the young man's too sanguine
anticipations of success. "All up with the boy, if he's going to take to
rhyming when he ought to be doing up papers of brown sugar and weighing
out pounds of tea. Poor-house,--that 's what it'll end in. Poets, to be
sure! Sausage-makers! Empty skins of old phrases,--stuff 'em with odds
and ends of old thoughts that never were good for anything,--cut 'em up
in lengths and sell'em to fools!

"And if they ain't big fools enough to buy 'em, give'em away; and if you
can't do that, pay folks to take'em. Bah! what a fine style of genius
common-sense is! There's a passage in the book that would fit half these
addle-headed rhymesters. What is that saying of mine about I squinting
brains?"

He took down "Thoughts on the Universe," and read:--

"Of Squinting Brains.

"Where there is one man who squints with his eyes, there are a dozen who
squint with their brains. It is an infirmity in one of the eyes, making
the two unequal in power, that makes men squint. Just so it is an
inequality in the two halves of the brain that makes some men idiots and
others rascals. I knows a fellow whose right half is a genius, but his
other hemisphere belongs to a fool; and I had a friend perfectly
honest on one side, but who was sent to jail because the other had
an inveterate tendency in the direction of picking pockets and
appropriating aes alienum."

All this, talking and reading to himself in his usual fashion.

The poetical faculty which was so freely developed in Gifted Hopkins had
never manifested itself in Cyprian Eveleth, whose look and voice might,
to a stranger,