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.