exander the
Great are some of them so fresh one might think they were newer than
much of the silver currency we were lately handling. As we have been
quoting from the poets this morning, I will follow the precedent, and
give some lines from an epistle of Pope to Addison after the latter had
written, but not yet published, his Dialogue on Medals. Some of these
lines have been lingering in my memory for a great many years, but I
looked at the original the other day and was so pleased with them that I
got them by heart. I think you will say they are singularly pointed and
elegant.

"Ambition sighed; she found it vain to trust
The faithless column and the crumbling bust;
Huge moles, whose shadows stretched from shore to shore,
Their ruins perished, and their place no more!
Convinced, she now contracts her vast design,
And all her triumphs shrink into a coin.
A narrow orb each crowded conquest keeps,
Beneath her palm here sad Judaea weeps;
Now scantier limits the proud arch confine,
And scarce are seen the prostrate Nile or Rhine;
A small Euphrates through the piece is rolled,
And little eagles wave their wings in gold."

It is the same thing in literature. Write half a dozen folios full of
other people's ideas (as all folios are pretty sure to be), and you
serve as ballast to the lower shelves of a library, about as like to be
disturbed as the kentledge in the hold of a ship. Write a story, or a
dozen stories, and your book will be in demand like an oyster while
it is freshly opened, and after tha--. The highways of literature are
spread over with the shells of dead novels, each of which has been
swallowed at a mouthful by the public, and is done with. But write a
volume of poems. No matter if they are all bad but one, if that one is
very good. It will carry your name down to posterity like the ring of
Thothmes, like the coin of Alexander. I don't suppose one would care a
great deal about it a hundred or a thousand years after he is dead,
but I don't feel quite sure. It seems as if, even in heaven, King
David might remember "The Lord is my Shepherd" with a certain twinge of
earthly pleasure. But we don't know, we don't know.

--What in the world can have become of That Boy and his popgun while all
this somewhat extended sermonizing was going on? I don't wonder you
ask, beloved Reader, and I suppose I must tell you how we got on so
long without interruption. We