My Literary Passions by William Dean Howells

This was the winter when my friend Piatt and I made our first literary venture together in those 'Poems of Two Friends; ' which hardly passed the circle of our amity; and it was altogether a time of high literary exaltation with me. I walked the streets of the friendly little city by day and by night with my head so full of rhymes and poetic phrases that it seemed as if their buzzing might have been heard several yards away; and I do not yet see quite how I contrived to keep their music out of my newspaper paragraphs. Out of the newspaper I could not keep it, and from time to time I broke into verse in its columns, to the great amusement of the leading editor, who knew me for a young man with a very sharp tooth for such self-betrayals in others. He wanted to print a burlesque review he wrote of the 'Poems of Two Friends' in our paper, but I would not suffer it. I must allow that it was very, funny, and that he was always a generous friend, whose wounds would have been as faithful as any that could have been dealt me then. He did not indeed care much for any poetry but that of Shakespeare and the 'Ingoldsby Legends; ' and when one morning a State Senator came into the office with a volume of Tennyson, and began to read,

"The poet in a golden clime was born, With golden stars above; Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn The love of love,"