This curious coincidence illustrates well enough some supposed cases of
plagiarism of which I will mention one where my name figured. When a
little poem called "The Two Streams" was first printed, a writer in the
New York "Evening Post" virtually accused the author of it of borrowing
the thought from a baccalaureate sermon of President Hopkins of
Williamstown, and printed a quotation from that discourse, which, as I
thought, a thief or catch-poll might well consider as establishing a fair
presumption that it was so borrowed. I was at the same time wholly
unconscious of ever having met with the discourse or the sentence which
the verses were most like, nor do I believe I ever had seen or heard
either. Some time after this, happening to meet my eloquent cousin,
Wendell Phillips, I mentioned the fact to him, and he told me that he had
once used the special image said to be borrowed, in a discourse delivered
at Williamstown. On relating this to my friend Mr. Buchanan Read, he
informed me that he too, had used the image,--perhaps referring to his
poem called "The Twins." He thought Tennyson had used it also. The
parting of the streams on the Alps is poetically elaborated in a passage
attributed to "M. Loisne," printed in the "Boston Evening Transcript" for
October 23, 1859. Captain, afterwards Sir Francis Head, speaks of the
showers parting on the Cordilleras, one portion going to the Atlantic,
one to the Pacific. I found the image running loose in my mind, without
a halter. It suggested itself as an illustration of the will, and I
worked the poem out by the aid of Mitchell's School Atlas.--The spores of
a great many ideas are floating about in the atmosphere. We no more know
where all the growths of our mind came from, than where the lichens which
eat the names off from the gravestones borrowed the germs that gave them
birth. The two match-boxes were just alike, but neither was a
plagiarism.

In the morning I took to the same wagon once more, but, instead of James