booksellers and at the stalls in the railroad stations. Then it
disappeared from public view. A few copies still kept their place on the
shelves of friends,--presentation copies, of course, as there is no
evidence that any were disposed of by sale; and now, one might as well
ask for the lost books of Livy as inquire at a bookstore for "Gaspings
for Immortality."

The authors of these poems are all round us, men and women, and no one
with a fair amount of human sympathy in his disposition would treat them
otherwise than tenderly. Perhaps they do not need tender treatment. How
do you know that posterity may not resuscitate these seemingly dead
poems, and give their author the immortality for which he longed and
labored? It is not every poet who is at once appreciated. Some will
tell you that the best poets never are. Who can say that you, dear
unappreciated brother or sister, are not one of those whom it is left for
after times to discover among the wrecks of the past, and hold up to the
admiration of the world?

I have not thought it necessary to put in all the interpellations, as the
French call them, which broke the course of this somewhat extended series
of remarks; but the comments of some of The Teacups helped me to shape
certain additional observations, and may seem to the reader as of more
significance than what I had been saying.

Number Seven saw nothing but the folly and weakness of the "rhyming
cranks," as he called them. He thought the fellow that I had described
as blubbering over his still-born poems would have been better occupied
in earning his living in some honest way or other. He knew one chap that
published a volume of verses, and let his wife bring up the wood for the
fire by which he was writing. A fellow says, "I am a poet!" and he