The pyramids last, it is true, but most of them have forgotten their builders’ names.  But the ring of Thothmes iii., who reigned some fourteen hundred years before our era, before Homer sang, before the Argonauts sailed, before Troy was built, is in the possession of Lord Ashburnham, and proclaims the name of the monarch who wore it more than three thousand years ago.  The gold coins with the head of Alexander 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.