Before going any further I must confess that I was exceedingly slow over Mr. Nahum's writings. Even over Volume I. When first I opened its pages I had had a poor liking for poetry because of a sort of contempt for it. "Poetry!" I would scoff to myself, and would shut up the covers of any such book with a kind of yawn inside me. Some of it had come my way in lesson books. This I could gabble off like a parrot, and with as much understanding; and I had just begun to grind out a little Latin verse for my father.
But I had never troubled to think about it; to share my Self with it; to examine it in order to see whether or not it was true; or to ask why it was written in this one way and in no other way. But apart from this, there were many old rhymes in Mr. Nahum's book—nursery things—which I had known since I knew anything. And I still have an old childish love for rhymes and jingles like them.
But what about the others? I began to ponder. After being so many hours alone in Mr. Nahum's room, among his secret belongings, I almost felt his presence there. When your mind is sunk in study, it is as if you were in a dream. But you cannot tell where, or in whose company, you may wake out of a dream. I remember one sultry afternoon being startled out of my wits by a sudden clap of thunder. I looked up, to find the whole room black, zigzag, and strange, and for a moment I fancied Mr. Nahum was actually there behind me; and not a friendly Mr. Nahum.
That is mere fancy; though in other ways he became so real to me at last that I would do things as if he had asked me to do them. For this reason, I think, I persevered with his book, swallowing some of the poems as if they were physic, simply because he had written them there. But the more I read, the more I came to enjoy them for their own sakes. Not all of them, of course. But I did see this, that like a carpenter who makes a table, a man who has written a poem has written it like that on purpose.
With this thought in my head I tried one day to alter the words of one or two of the simple and easy poems; or to put the words in a different order. And I found by so doing that you not only altered the sound of the poem, but that even the slightest alteration in the sound a little changed the sense. Either you lost something of the tune and runningness; or the words did not clash right; or you blurred the picture the words gave you; or some half-hidden meaning vanished away. I don't mean that every poem is perfect; but only that when I changed them it was almost always very much for the worse. I was very slow in all this; but, still, I went on. No. III, I remember, was the old nursery jingle, "Old King Cole":—
Old King Cole was a merry old soul,
And a merry old soul was he;
He called for his pipe,
And he called for his bowl,
And he called for his fiddlers three....