Completing an Unfinished Stanza
It is related that Dr. Mansel, of Trinity College, Cambridge, by chance called at the rooms of a brother Cantab, who was absent, but had left on his table the opening of a poem, in the following lofty strain:
“The sun’s perpendicular rays
Illumined the depths of the sea.”
Here the flight of the poet, by some accident, stopped short, but Dr. Mansel, equal to the occasion, completed the stanza in the following facetious style:
“And the fishes, beginning to sweat,
Cried ‘Damn it,’ how hot we shall be.”