them into a book. The book fell into the hands of one then held
to be supreme as a literary judge--Edgar Allen Poe. It was laughed at in
ink that made the literary world laugh. The poet Longfellow's bust now
holds an ideal place in Westminster Abbey, between the memorials of
Dryden and Chaucer, and at the foot of the tombs of England's kings.

Keats was laughed at; Wordsworth was deemed a fool.

A number of disdainful doctors met on October 16, 1846, in the
amphitheater of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, to see a
young medical student try to demonstrate that a patient upon whom a
surgical operation was to be performed could be rendered insensible to
pain. The sufferer was brought into the clear light. The young student
touched his face with an unknown liquid whose strange odor filled the
room. He was in oblivion. The knives cut and the blood flowed, and he
knew it not. Pain was thus banished from the room of surgery. That young
medical student and dentist was Dr. W. T. G. Morton, whose monument may
be seen in the Boston Public Garden, and in whose honor the
semicentennial of the discovery of anaesthesia has but recently been
celebrated.

"So, with a few romantic boys and crazy girls you expect to see the
world converted," said a wise New York journal less than a century ago,
as the first missionaries began to sail away. But the song still arose
over the sea--

"In the desert let me labor,
On the mountain let me till"--

until there came a missionary jubilee, whose anthems were repeated from
land to land until they encircled the earth.

When Browning first published Sordello, the poem met with common
ridicule. Even Alfred Tennyson is said to have remarked that "there were
but two lines in it that he could understand, and they were both
untrue." The first line of the poem was, "Who will, _may_ hear
Sordello's story told"; and the last line of the poem was, "Who would,
_has_ heard Sordello's story told." Yet the poem is ranked now among
the intellectual achievements of the century in the analysis of one of
the deeper problems of life.

Samuel F. B. Morse was laughed at. McCormick, whose invention reaps the
fields of the world, was ridiculed by the London Times, "the Thunderer."
"If that crazy Wheelwright calls again, do not admit him," said a
British consul to his servant, of one who wished to make new ports and a
new commerce for South America, and whose plans are about to harnes