University of Virginia Library

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 catchpoll might well consider as establishing a fair presumption that it was so borrowed. I was at the same time wholly unconscious of 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 Oct. 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 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.—