for Immortality” was published, advertised, praised by the professionals whose business it is to boost their publishers’ authors.  A week and more it was seen on the counters of the 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 thinks himself different from common folks.  He ought to be excused from military service.  He might be killed, and the world would lose the inestimable products of his genius.  “I believe some of ’em think,” said Number Seven, “that they ought not to be called upon to pay their taxes and their bills for household expenses, like the rest of us.”

“If they would only study and take to heart Horace’s ‘Ars Poetica,’” said the Professor, “it would be a great benefit to them and to the world at large.  I would not advise you to follow him too literally, of course, for, as you will see, the changes that have taken place since his time would make some of his precepts useless and some dangerous, but the spirit of them is always instructive.  This is the way, somewhat modernized and accompanied by my running commentary, in which he counsels a young poet: 

“’Don’t try to write poetry, my boy, when you are not in the mood for doing it,—­when it goes against the grain.  You are a fellow of sense,—­you understand all that.