THE FATE OF A POEM. 289 



in July, 1853. It had been my intention to have 

 published a poera, entitled " The Last of the New 

 Forest Deer," and in that poem there should have 

 been enough of the romantic to have satisfied the 

 fairest bosom full of sio-hs, and to have excluded the 

 book from any boarding school presided over by or- 

 dinary or unfavoured females, in whose hearts, be- 

 cause unasked-for, had grown up the most savage 

 virtue. This poem was nearly finished, but on offering 

 it for sale, I found that my good and former friends, 

 Longman, Colburn, and Bentley, very much against 

 their generous inclination I am sure, thought of 

 " the devil's walk at break of day," and pluming 

 themselves " like cormorants," were resolved " to 

 sit hard by the tree of knoAvledge;" and they told 

 me "poetry was a drug in the present market." Li 

 short, I found that with all the advantages boasted 

 by the present enlightened age, the taste for poetry 

 was gone, unless it savoured of hj^mns, or the to 

 my mind impious rhymings of Mr. Goodfellow, 

 in his terrible attempt to portray the Saviour's 

 childhood, called the " Golden Legend." There are 

 some few things which tell better in poetry than 

 prose, and as I am resolved to cling to my old at- 

 tachment to the Muses, not because there are nine, 

 as I hear some vindictive creature say, but because 

 I love them better than anything else, and have a 

 veneration for Byron and Moore, as well as a living 

 attaclnnent " for the last," though not the least, of the 

 poets, for the " King Arthur " of my friend Bulwer 

 Lytton ; though my publisher shakes his head, I am 

 resolved, I sa}", to escape from prose, and tell one little 

 incident in verse, abstracted from the poem on the 

 New Forest shelved for want of a purchaser. The 



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