Perhaps, however, we overrated our own importance, or the Bostonian want of common civility—­which is not quite so manifest as one or two of their editors would wish the public to believe.  We assure Major Noah that he is wrong.  The Bostonians are well-bred—­as very dull persons very generally are.  Still, with their vile ingratitude staring us in the eyes, it could scarcely be supposed that we would put ourselves to the trouble of composing for the Bostonians anything in the shape of an original poem.  We did not.  We had a poem, of about 500 lines, lying by us—­one quite as good as new—­one, at all events, that we considered would answer sufficiently well for an audience of Transcendentalists. That we gave them—­it was the best that we had—­for the price—­and it did answer remarkably well.  Its name was not ’The Messenger-Star’—­who but Miss Walter would ever think of so delicious a little bit of invention as that?  We had no name for it at all.  The poem is what is occasionally called a ’juvenile poem,’ but the fact is it is anything but juvenile now, for we wrote it, printed it, and published it, in book form, before we had completed our tenth year.  We read it verbatim, from a copy now in our possession, and which we shall be happy to show at any moment to any of our inquisitive friends.  We do not, ourselves, think the poem a remarkably good one:  it is not sufficiently transcendental.  Still it did well enough for the Boston audience—­who evinced characteristic discrimination in understanding, and especially applauding all those knotty passages which we ourselves have not yet been able to understand.

“As regards the auger of The Boston Times, and one or two other absurdities—­as regards, we say the wrath of Achilles—­we incurred it-or rather its manifestation—­by letting some of our cat out of the bag a few hours sooner than we had intended.  Over a bottle of champagne, that night, we confessed to Messrs. Cushing, Whipple, Hudson, Fields, and a few other natives who swear not altogether by the frog-pond-we confessed, we say, the soft impeachment of the hoax. Et hine ille irae.  We should have waited a couple of days.”

It is scarcely necessary to suggest that this must have been written before he had quite recovered from the long intoxication which maddened him at the time to which it refers—­that he was not born in Boston-that the poem was not published in his tenth year, and that the “hoax” was all an after-thought.  Two weeks later he renewed the discussion of the subject in The Broadway Journal, commenting as follows upon allusions to it by other parties: