8/23 The smiles of woman, in the mean time, encouraged the young poet to smite the lyre. Fame beckoned him upward from her templed steep. The rhymes which rose before him unbidden were as the rounds of Jacob's ladder, on which he would climb to a heaven of-glory. "All up with the boy, if he's going to take to rhyming when he ought to be doing up papers of brown sugar and weighing out pounds of tea. Poor-house,--that 's what it'll end in. |