"If I furnish inspiration for nothing, I may as well have some literary credit. The village swallows what you furnish," says the chap, reasoningly, "and you swallow what I furnish, and so I'm the head editor after all."
But he took down the sign, my boy, when the editor dissolved the partnership by paying his score.
What are called Spirited Editorials in the New York papers, my boy, very often involve two swallows as well as a spread-eagle.
While looking over some old magazines in the Lily office one day, I found in an ancient British periodical a raking article upon American literature, wherein the critic affirmed that all our writers were but weak imitators of English authors, and that such a thing even as a Distinctively American Poem sui generis, had not yet been produced.
This radical sneer at the United States of America fired my Yankee blood, my boy, and I vowed within myself to write a poem, not only distinctively American, but of such a character that only America could have produced it. In the solitude of my room, that night, I wooed the aboriginal muse, and two days thereafter the Lily of the Valley contained my distinctive American poem of
THE AMERICAN TRAVELER.
To Lake Aghmoogenegamook,
All in the State of Maine,
A man from Wittequergaugaum came
One evening in the rain.