HTML form help

[Ghoulish Delight]

Arrgh. I'm mired in form tags, javascript, and cgi/perl. There's ONE freaking thing that I can't get to work, hopefully someone can give me a hand.

I'm creating a form that I've split up into 2 pages. What I need to do is take the POST results from the first page and make them hidden inputs on the 2nd. I can't for the life of my figure it out.

So the form on page 1 is:

<form method="post" action="page2.html">
<input type="text" name="input1">
<input type="button" name="submit" value="submit">
</form>



and then page two I've tried (with no success):

<form method="post" action="a_script.cgi">
<input type="hidden" name="input1" value=$_POST['input1']>
....
....
</form>



What am I doing wrong? Is it even possible?