urned
them at once with a civil word or two of flat rejection. One publisher
alone--himself a man of letters, and who in youth had gone through
the same bitter process of disillusion that now awaited the village
genius--volunteered some kindly though stern explanation and counsel to
the unhappy boy. This gentleman read a portion of Leonard's principal
poem with attention, and even with frank admiration. He could appreciate
the rare promise that it manifested. He sympathized with the boy's
history, and even with his hopes; and then he said, in bidding him
farewell,

"If I publish this poem for you, speaking as a trader, I shall be a
considerable loser. Did I publish all I admire, out of sympathy with
the author, I should be a ruined man. But suppose that, impressed as
I really am with the evidence of no common poetic gifts in this
manuscript, I publish it, not as a trader, but a lover of literature,
I shall in reality, I fear, render you a great disservice, and perhaps
unfit your whole life for the exertions on which you must rely for
independence."

"How, sir?" cried Leonard. "Not that I would ask you to injure yourself
for me," he added, with proud tears in his eyes.

"How, my young friend? I will explain. There is enough talent in
these verses to induce very flattering reviews in some of the literary
journals. You will read these, find yourself proclaimed a poet, will cry
'I am on the road to fame.' You will come to me, 'And my poem, how does
it sell?' I shall point to some groaning shelf, and say, 'Not twenty
copies! The journals may praise, but the public will not buy it.'
'But you will have got a name,' you say. Yes, a name as a poet just
sufficiently known to make every man in practical business disinclined
to give fair trial to your talents in a single department of positive
life; none like to employ poets;--a name that will not put a penny in
your purse,--worse still, that will operate as a barrier against every
escape into the ways whereby men get to fortune. But having once tasted
praise, you will continue to sigh for it: you will perhaps never again
get a publisher to bring forth a poem, but you will hanker round the
purlieus of the Muses, scribble for periodicals, fall at last into a
bookseller's drudge. Profits will be so precarious and uncertain, that
to avoid debt may be impossible; then, you who now seem so ingenuous and
so proud, will sink deeper still into the literary mendicant, begging,
borrowing