Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[259] in return for the prospective copyright of his posthumous memoirs. Miss Anna Seward, writing to Sir Walter Scott in 1786, ranks him and the equally forgotten Mason as “the two foremost poets of the day;” she calls Hayley's poems “magnolias, roses, and amaranths,” and pronounces his esteem a distinction greater than monarchs hold it in their power to bestow. Yet probably nine out of ten who shall read these lines will have to consult a biographical dictionary to find out who Hayley was; while his odd protege, William Blake, whom the fine ladies of his day wondered at Hayley for patronizing, is now a favorite with lovers of literature and art.

It makes indeed a part of the magic of new books that no man can guess securely at their future. I remember vividly the surprise of my old friend and guide, Professor Edward Tyrrell Channing, then the highest literary authority in America, when I inserted in my Commencement oration at Harvard in 1841, a boyish compliment to Tennyson; only two or three copies of whose first thin volumes had as yet crossed the Atlantic, though these had been read with enthusiasm