28 October 1853
Fri. 28th Unsettled—Reading & walking A.M. Having nothing else to do, and feeling in the vein, I thought I would try my hand at making poetry, and so turned out some forty lines or more, of rhyme—as an appeal for the Washington Monument Showed the same to the editor of the Times, himself a poet, who was so pleased with it that I let him have the lines for publication In the evening at Mozart Hall. Heard (but didn't understand) a lecture on Catholicism by Alessandro Gazzi Gavazzi , formerly an Italian priest, but now a denunciator of the Catholic faith. He was very enthusiastic in his language and also in the it delivery of it, but his knowledge of
