Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

But there is in literary fame such a thing as recurrence—a swing of the pendulum which at first brings despair to the young author, yet yields him at last his only consolation. L‘éternite est une pendule, wrote Jacques Bridaine, that else forgotten Frenchman whose phrase gave Longfellow the hint of his ‘Old Clock on the Stair.’ When our professors informed us that books remained unchanged, those of us who were studious at once pinched ourselves to buy books; but the authors for whom we madeeconomies in our wardrobe are now as obsolete, very likely, as the garments that we exchanged for them. No undergraduate would now take off my hands at half price, probably, the sets of Landor's ‘Imaginary Conversations’ and Coleridge's ‘Literary Remains,’ which it once seemed worth a month of threadbare elbows to possess. I lately called the attention of a young philologist to a tolerably full set of Thomas Taylor's translations, and found chat he had never heard of even the name of that servant of obscure learning. In college we studied