Thenceforth I wore negligent linen; frequently rested my head upon the forefinger of my right hand, with a lofty and abstracted air; assumed an expression of settled and mysterious gloom when at church, and suffered my hair to grow long and uncombed.
My bearing during this period of infatuation could hardly fail to attract considerable attention in our village, and there were two opinions about me. One was that I had been jilted; the other that I was likely to become a vagabond and an actor. My father inclined to the former, and left me, as he thought, to get over my disappointment in the natural way.
My peripatetic spell had lasted about six weeks, when I formed the acquaintance of the editor of the Lily of the Valley, who permitted me to mope in his office now and then, and soothed my literary inflammation by allowing me to write “puffs” for the village milliner.
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 as a Distinctly American Poem, sui generis, had not yet been produced.
“IN THE SOLITUDE OF MY ROOM, THAT NIGHT, I WOOED THE ABORIGINAL MUSE.”
This radical sneer at the United States of America fired my Yankee blood, 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 TRAVELLER.”
To Lake Aghmoogenegamook,
All in the State of Maine,