Could poets have been made other than by the hand of Nature, Mark would certainly have become one, for he strove with an indefatigable ardor that nothing could dampen to succeed; but the divine afflatus so charily bestowed was lacking, and he thrummed the lyre without evoking strains immortal. What phrenzy and foolscap were wasted--what moonlight walks indulged in, and sylvan groves haunted, to meditate and seek inspiration! How often he sauntered around the margin of the Passaic, watching the leap of the cataract and rise of its snowy mist, as its low thunder lulled him into delicious day dreams. Far into the night would he linger reclining against the bole of some tree, gazing with straining eyes towards Mr. Heath's villa, whose gray walls loomed in the moonlight like a feudal castle, to catch, perhaps, a glimpse of a shadow that might appear occasionally behind the curtains of a lighted room that he knew to be Edna's. Often had the faint sound of music or mirth, that reached him from the open drawing-room windows, filled him with envy and jealousy, as he thought of the Rev. Spencer Abbott and young Mumbie, who were constant visitors at the villa. Then, dismally homeward would he wend his way, go to his room, and spend the silent watches of the night racking his brains to commit his thoughts to paper. Quires, nay reams, were covered with superfine tropes and metaphors, as he strove to coin words that the world would not willingly let die. He ventured to show his lucubrations to Dr. Wattletop, but the reception they met with was neither flattering nor even encouraging. "My dear boy, drop all this," was the advice given. "Not only are you wasting precious time, but your taste and mind are becoming vitiated by the namby-pamby trash of modern rhymesters. If you must plagiarize, do it from Pope, or Milton, or Gray. Study them, or the master Shakespeare. Remember, as Coleridge said, poetry must be either music or sense, and I cannot say there is much of either in your verses. Get at the kernel. But after all, the study for a poetically inclined youth is medicine, singular as that may seem to you. If the desire be to awaken sublime ideas, investigate the abstruse problem of life. Follow the noblest calling, the art of healing, and seek to penetrate the arcana of Nature. I wish I could induce you to become one of us. Our profession greatly needs ardent and intelligent recruits, else we shall be overrun with quacks in every shape. Look at the frightful progress of that modern humbug, homoeopathy. There is no error, however absurd, but will find supporters and disciples, and nowhere can there be a nobler field for the exercise of the highest talent than in combating and routing those egregious and pernicious pretenders to science, who, with the absurd brocard, that 'like cures like,' impose on the simple and gullible. Now I am anything but illiberal--if anything, I err on the opposite side. Whatever my convictions may be, I am willing to give a patient hearing and investigation to any theory or system bearing a show of probability, that is advanced in a truthful, earnest, and humble spirit. I do not forget that alchemy was the mother of chemistry, and astrology of astronomy; that Harvey met with bigoted opposition, and in short that it becomes the seeker to be humble; but when I see a fellow like this Keene here--this hatchet-faced Yankee from Connecticut, who probably a year ago was peddling wooden clocks, going around Belton with his ridiculous pellets, and presuming to be a physician, I am provoked beyond endurance, and feel sometimes as if I could give the fellow a horse-whipping. Well, well, the fools are not all dead yet."