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 Grayden, I was to have for my driver a young man who spelt his name “Phillip Ottenheimer” and whose features at once showed him to be an Israelite.  I found him agreeable enough, and disposed to talk.  So I asked him many questions about his religion, and got some answers that sound strangely in Christian ears.  He was from Wittenberg, and had been educated in strict Jewish fashion.  From his childhood he had read Hebrew, but was not much of a scholar otherwise.  A young person of his race lost caste utterly by marrying a Christian.  The Founder of our religion was considered by the Israelites to have been “a right smart man and a great doctor.”  But the horror with which the reading of the New Testament by any young person of their faith would be regarded was as great, I judged by his language, as that of one of our straitest sectaries would be, if he found his son or daughter perusing the “Age of Reason.”