was over!  Well, then, there is no use in gorging one’s self with knowledge, and no need of self-reproach because one is content to remain more or less ignorant of many things which interest his fellow-creatures.  We gain a good deal of knowledge through the atmosphere; we learn a great deal by accidental hearsay, provided we have the mordant in our own consciousness which makes the wise remark, the significant fact, the instructive incident, take hold upon it.  After the stage of despair comes the period of consolation.  We soon find that we are not so much worse off than most of our neighbors as we supposed.  The fractional value of the wisest shows a small numerator divided by an infinite denominator of knowledge.

I made some explanations to The Teacups, the other evening, which they received very intelligently and graciously, as I have no doubt the readers of these reports of mine will receive them.  If the reader will turn back to the end of the fourth number of these papers, he will find certain lines entitled, “Cacoethes Scribendi.”  They were said to have been taken from the usual receptacle of the verses which are contributed by The Teacups, and, though the fact was not mentioned, were of my own composition.  I found them in manuscript in my drawer, and as my subject had naturally suggested the train of thought they carried out into extravagance, I printed them.  At the same time they sounded very natural, as we say, and I felt as if I had published them somewhere or other before; but I could find no evidence of it, and so I ventured to have them put in type.

And here I wish to take breath for a short, separate paragraph.  I have often felt, after writing a line which pleased me more than common, that it was not new, and perhaps was not my own.  I have very rarely, however, found such a coincidence in ideas or expression as would be enough to justify an accusation of unconscious plagiarism,—­conscious plagiarism is not my particular failing.  I therefore say my say, set down my thought, print my line, and do not heed the suspicion that I may not be as original as I supposed, in the passage I have been writing.  My experience may be worth something to a modest young writer, and so I have interrupted what I was about to say by intercalating this paragraph.

In this instance my telltale suspicion had not been at fault.  I had printed those same lines, years ago, in “The Contributors’ Club,” to which I have rarely sent any of my prose or verse.  Nobody but the editor has noticed the fact, so far as I know.  This is consoling, or mortifying, I hardly know which.  I suppose one has a right to plagiarize from himself, but he does not want to present his work as fresh from the workshop when it has been long standing in his neighbor’s shop-window.

But I have just received a letter from a brother of the late Henry Howard Brownell, the poet of the Bay Fight and the River Fight, in which he quotes a passage from an old book, “A Heroine, Adventures of Cherubina,” which might well have suggested my own lines, if I had ever seen it.  I have not the slightest recollection of the book or the passage.  I think its liveliness and “local color” will make it please the reader, as it pleases me, more than my own more prosaic extravagances: