I began to make blunders when I paid calls or visits, and a woman I had
known and liked as a child told me I had changed for the worse. I had
wanted to be wise and eloquent, an essay on the younger Ampere had helped
me to this ambition, and when I was alone I exaggerated my blunders and
was miserable. I had begun to write poetry in imitation of Shelley and of
Edmund Spenser, play after play--for my father exalted dramatic poetry
above all other kinds--and I invented fantastic and incoherent plots. My
lines but seldom scanned, for I could not understand the prosody in the
books, although there were many lines that taken by themselves had music.
I spoke them slowly as I wrote and only discovered when I read them to
somebody else that there was no common music, no prosody. There were,
however, moments of observation; for, even when I caught moths no longer,
I still noticed all that passed; how the little moths came out at sunset,
and how after that there were only a few big moths till dawn brought
little moths again; and what birds cried out at night as if in their
sleep.