This young gentleman had the enormous advantage of that all-subduing accomplishment, the poetical endowment.
No woman, it is pretty generally understood, can resist the youth or man who addresses her in verse.

The thought that she is the object of a poet's love is one which fills a woman's ambition more completely than all that wealth or office or social eminence can offer.

Do the young millionnaires and the members of the General Court get letters from unknown ladies, every day, asking for their autographs and photographs?
Well, then! Mr.Gifted Hopkins, being a poet, felt that it was so, to the very depth of his soul.

Could he not confer that immortality so dear to the human heart?
Not quite yet, perhaps,--though the "Banner and Oracle" gave him already "an elevated niche in the Temple of Fame," to quote its own words,--but in that glorious summer of his genius, of which these spring blossoms were the promise.

It was a most formidable battery, then, which Cyprian's first rival opened upon the fortress of Myrtle's affections.
His second rival, Mr.William Murray Bradshaw, had made a half-playful bet with his fair relative, Mrs.Clymer Ketchum, that he would bag a girl within twelve months of date who should unite three desirable qualities, specified in the bet, in a higher degree than any one of the five who were on the matrimonial programme which she had laid out for him,--and Myrtle was the girl with whom he meant to win the bet.