Toward the end of the year the volume of poems pressed hard upon him. “I should have written to you,” he writes to Briggs, 13 November, 1847, “at any rate just to say that I loved you still and to ask how you did, had I not been most preposterously busy with the printers. I had calculated in a loose way that I had ‘copy’ enough prepared to make as large a volume as I intended mine should be, but about three weeks ago the printers overtook me, and since then we have been neck and neck for something like a hundred pages--thirty page heats. It was only yesterday that I won the cup. Everybody has a notion that it is of advantage to be out before Christmas; and though I feel a sort of contempt for a demand so adventitiously created, and do not wish anybody to buy my book but those who buy to read, yet it is one of these little points which we find it convenient to yield in life, and not the less readily because it will be for our advantage not to be obstinate. I have a foolish kind of pride in these particulars. I had rather, for example, that you should have copied into the _Mirror_ a column of abuse than those exaggerated commendations of my Louisville friend. I do not know whether it is a common feeling or not, but I can never get to consider myself as anything more than a boy. My temperament is so youthful, that whenever I am addressed (I mean by mere acquaintances) as if my opinion were worth anything, I can hardly help laughing. I cannot but think to myself with an inward laugh: ‘My good friend, you would be as mad as a hornet with me, if you knew that I was only a boy of twelve behind a bearded vizor.’ This feeling is so strong that I have got into a way of looking on the Poet Lowell as an altogether different personage from myself, and feel a little offended when my friends confound the two.”