Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 October 1884 — Their Methods. [ARTICLE]

Their Methods.

Tennyson lately gave to a newspaper correspondent an account of his method of composition. Whenever he sees a picturesque scene in nature, he jots down the four or five words which describe it most perfectly, to be ■worked afterward into his poems. “A full full sea glazed with muffled moonlight ;* “Its stormy crests that smote against the skies;” “Slow dropping veils of thinnest lawn, ” are examples of these “studies from the life.” The last line, applied to a vapory water fall in the Pyrenees, was sharply condemned when it appeared, the critic stating that “Mr. Tennyson evidently studied waterfalls in the theater, where they were represented by sheets of lawn." Dickens had precisely the same patient, laborious habit in preparing material for his novels. A peculiar or marked house, name, or manner never escaped his keen eye. A word scribbled on the back of an envelope, a fact sketched on his thumb-nail under the dining-table, were the dry bones which grew into vivid, breathing reality, to enchant the English-speaking world. This slow, careful method of piling brick on brick in the building of an immortal work is very different from the idea of most youthful writers. They imagine that all the creations of genius are dreamed into the world like Coleridge’s “Temple of Kubla Khan.” If the patient accumulation of material and nicety of detail are necessary to a poet or novelist, how much more are they essential to a scientific man. Frome, a pupil of Abernethy, was accustomed to grow extremely weary of that great physician’s habit of taking down every symptom of every case. “Petty diseases of petty people!” he grumbled. “One might as well copy the king’s head on a dozen shillings!” Frome at last began to practice for himself, and came one day in great excitement to Abernethy. He had been called to attend the child of a royal duke, ill with scarlet fever. The symptoms were peculiar. After relating them to Abernethy, the great physician did not lift his eyes from his writing, but simply said: “Case number ten. Volumes lettered S. F. You will find there diagnoses of several hundred cases. You cannot fail to get what you need. ‘Petty people’ have the same blood, livers and stomachs as the children of royal dukes.” With the aid of his master’s notes Frome gained a more satisfactory view of his case, and by the lesson he had thus received was made to entertain more respect for his teacher’s thoroughness and attention to the minute details of his professional work. — Youth’s Companion.