Now there is use in “striving against nature,” as that phrase is generally understood; else there is no use in the Christian religion, and we may at once relinquish its doctrines and precepts as so many superfluities, and look upon the matchless history in the Gospels as a splendid blunder. If there is no use in striving against nature when nature is in the wrong, or takes the less noble side of the question, then we can dispense, not only with Christianity, but with all schools and all discipline. Without instruction and without training, anybody can act, if he is bound to act only just as he happens to feel at the time. To be consistent, even the prize-fighter should refuse to submit to his “training;” because, for the sake of greater bodily strength and celerity and greater accuracy of motion, he is required to abstain from many things which it is natural for him to do. Rather let him who ever means to be anybody worth naming, or anybody worth the trouble of living, say, with Walter Aimwell, “I will never slacken my fight with my faults, however unsuccessful I may be!”
CHAPTER VI.
METRICAL COMPOSITIONS.
Probably Walter Aimwell never attempted much poetical composition after his apprenticeship. At least, but very few specimens have been preserved, except such as are recorded in the note-book commenced in the year 1840.
Nothing so certainly requires great inborn genius as to obtain a name or to succeed as a poet; except working in a tropical swamp in the sunshine, no labor so much depends on the constitution with which a person comes into the world, as that of uttering real poetry.
It is evident that Walter Aimwell had not a commanding genius of this kind, although he had as much talent as many who write books of verse very pleasant for their friends to read, and who obtain a very respectable reputation.
His first attempt is the rendering into rhyme and measure of the Twenty-Third Psalm. The surpassingly beautiful original, and the rhythmic translations of it by superior poets, leave little chance for distinction to the apprentice-boy. Yet here it is. He entitles it
THE GOOD SHEPHERD.
The Lord my Shepherd is,
No want I’ll ever know;