He fetched a long breath, and opened first that magazine, _clarum et venerabile nomen_, from which he might reasonably expect the greatest surprises of merit in the verse. There were only two pieces, and neither seemed to him of the old-time quality, but neither was such as he would himself have perhaps rejected if he had been editor. Then he plunged at the heap, and in a fifteen-cent magazine of recent renown he found among five poems a good straight piece of realistic characterization which did much to cheer him. In this, a little piece of two stanzas, the author had got at the heart of a good deal of America. In another cheap magazine, professing to be devoted wholly to stories, he hoped for a breathing-space, and was tasked by nothing less familiar than Swift's versification of a well-known maxim of La Rouchefoucauld. In a ten-cent magazine which is too easily the best of that sort, he found two pieces of uncommon worth, which opened the way so promisingly, indeed, for happier fortunes that he was not as much surprised as he might later have been in finding five poems, all good, in one of the four greater, or at least dearer, magazines. One of these pieces was excellent landscape, and another a capital nature piece; if a third was somewhat strained, it was also rather strong, and a fourth had the quiet which it is hard to know from repose. Two poems in another of the high-priced magazines were noticeable, one for sound poetic thinking, and the other as very truthfully pathetic. The two in a cheap magazine, by two Kentucky poets, a song and a landscape, were one genuinely a song, and the other a charming communion with nature. In a pair of periodicals devoted to outdoor life, on the tamer or wilder scale, there were three poems, one celebrating the delights of a winter camp, which he found simple, true in feeling, and informal in phrasing; another full of the joy of a country ride, very songy, very blithe, and original; and a third a study of scenery which it realized to the mind's eye, with some straining in the wording, but much felicity in the imagining. A Mid-Western magazine had an excellent piece by a poet of noted name, who failed to observe that his poem ended a stanza sooner than he did. In a periodical devoted to short stories, or abandoned to them, there were two good pieces, one of them delicately yet distinctly reproducing certain poetic aspects of New York, and giving the sense of a fresh talent. Where the critic would hardly have looked for them, in a magazine of professed fashion and avowed smartness, he came upon three pieces, one sweet and fine, one wise and good, one fresh and well turned. A newer periodical, rather going in for literary quality, had one fine piece, with a pretty surprise in it, and another touched with imaginative observation.