"I may tell you in confidence that I am so well pleased with this second volume, now that I see it in print, that I really think it will be a great success.... If, now, in return for this great work, you are willing to do me a very little favor, and one that is easily performed, I will beg you each Easter to let me know how many copies have been sold." For two years he heard nothing, then in answer to a letter from him, Brockhaus wrote:-- "In reply to your inquiry concerning the sale of your book, I can only tell you that, to my sorrow, I have made a very poor business out of it. Further particulars I cannot enter into." "Many a rose," Schopenhauer murmured, as he refolded the note and turned to other things. In 1850, when, after six years' daily labor, he had completed his last work, "Parerga und Paralipomena," his literary reputation was still so insignificant that Brockhaus refused to publish it. Schopenhauer then offered it, unavailingly, to half a dozen other publishers. No one would have anything to do with it; the name which it bore would have frightened a pirate, and the boldest in the guild was afraid to examine its contents. "One thing is certain," said Schopenhauer, reflectively, "I am unworthy of my contemporaries, or they of me." The "Parerga," however, in spite of the lack of allurement in its title, was not destined to wither in manuscript. After much reconnoitring a publisher was discovered in Berlin who, unwillingly, consented to produce it, and thereupon two volumes of the most original and entertaining essays were given to the public. For this work Schopenhauer received ten copies in full payment. Meanwhile a few adherents had rallied about him. Brockhaus, in an attempt to make the best of a bad bargain, had marked the "Welt" down to the lowest possible price, and a few copies had in consequence fallen into intelligent hands. Among its readers there were some who came to Frankfort to make the author's acquaintance; a proceeding which pleased, yet alarmed Schopenhauer not a little. One of them wrote to people with whom he was unacquainted, advising them to read the work at once. "He is a fanatic," said Schopenhauer, in complacent allusion to him, "a fanatic, that's what he is." Dr. Gwinner, his subsequent biographer, whom he met about this time, was his apostle, while Dr. Frauenstadt, another Boswell, whose acquaintance he made at _table d'hôte_, he called his arch-evangelist, and, not without pathos, repeated to him Byron's seductive lines,-- "In the desert a fountain is springing, In the white waste there still is a tree, And a bird in the solitude singing, That speaks to my spirit of thee."