tion the statement; but the mood of these poems is not habitual with me, nor characteristic. They did, however, grow out of strong convictions. . . I have always been instinctively shy of "topics of the day." A good poem on some passing event is certain of instant success; but when the event is passed, few things are more certain of oblivion. Jones' or Smith's lines "to my lady's eyebrow" - which is lovely in every age― will outlive nine tenths of the noisy verse of our stress and storm period. Smith or Jones, who never dreamed of having a Mission, will placidly sweep down to posterity over the fall of a girl's eyelash, leaving about all the shrill didactic singers high and dry "on the sands of time." Enviable Jones, or Smith! .

Believe me, your sincere friend,

T. B. ALDRICH

Of the curative properties of poetry, and of the kind that should be taken homeopathically

...

(John G. Whittier to Mrs. Annie Fields)

2d mo., 9, 1888

I AM delighted to have such a favorable report

from thee by Sarah's nice letter. Sitting by the peat fire, listening to Lowell's reading of his own verses ! A convalescent princess with her minstrel in attendance! There may be a question as to curative properties of Dr. Lowell's dose, but that its flavor was agreeable I have no doubt. My own experience of the poetry cure was not satisfactory. Some years ago, when I was slowly getting up from illness, an honest friend of mine, an orthodox minister, in the very kindness of his heart thought to help me on by administering a poem in five cantos, illustrating the five points of Calvinism. I could only take a homeopathic dose of it. Its unmistakable flavor of brimstone

Newspaper Jokes

disagreed with my stomach, probably because I was a Quaker. . .

Charles Godfrey Leland deplores the change in American humor

(To Miss Mary A. Owen)

HOTEL VICTORIA, FLORENCE, Feb. 3d, 1895

MANY

ANY thanks for the letter, which is indeed a letter worth reading, which few are in these days when so few people write anything but notes or rubbish. Be sure of one thing, that yours are always read with a relish. For it is marvellously true that as tools are never wanting to an artist, there is always abundance to make a letter with to those who know how to write. There

is always something to "right about" or to turn round to and see! Dapprimo, I thank you for the jokes from the newspapers. They are very good, but I observe that since I was in America, the real old extravaganza, the wild eccentric outburst, is disappearing from country papers. No editor bursts now on his readers all at once with the awful question, "If ink stands why does n't it walk?" Nor have I heard for years of the old-fashioned sequences, when one man began with a verse of poetry and every small newspaper reprinted it, adding a parody. Thus they began with Ann Tiquity and then added Ann Gelic and Ann O'Dyne — till they had finished the Anns. Emerson's "Brahma" elicited hundreds of parodies, till he actually suppressed it.

Then there were the wild outbursts of poems such as —

I seen her out a-walking

In her habit de la rue,

And 't aint no use a-talking

But she's pumpkins and a few.

There was something Indian-like, aboriginal, and wild in the American fun of 40 years ago (vide Albert Pike's "Arkansas Gentleman" and the "Harp of a Thousand Strings") which has no parallel now. My own "beautiful poem " on a girl who had her underskirt made out of a coffee bag was republished a thousand times,

we were

wilder in those days, and more eccentric. All of these which you send are very good, but they might all have been made in England. They are mild. Ere long, there will be no America. .

Thomas Bailey Aldrich on letter writers

(To Laurence Hutton)

PONKAPOG, MASS., Oct. 31, 1893

EAR LAURENCE, - Of course I would a hundred

DEAR

times rather sojourn with your death-masks than stick myself up in that room at The Players, where memory never lets go its grip on me for a moment. . . .

I did n't know that He must have quoted

It was nothing I inhope it was not too

I have n't seen Winter's book yet. there were any words of mine in it.1 something from one of my letters. tended to be printed, of course. intime, for I don't like to wear my heart on my sleeve. The more I feel, the less I say about it.

I

I've just been reading Lowell's letters. How good and how poor they are! Nearly all of them are too self-conscious. Emerson and Whittier are about the only men in that famous group who were not thinking about themselves the whole while. They were too simple to pose, or to be intentionally brilliant. Emerson shed his silver like the

1 See page 346.

A Musical Humbug

moon, without knowing it. However, we all can't be great and modest at the same moment!

Tell Mark that I love him just the same as if he had n't written successful books.

De gustibus non disputandum

MY

I

(Bret Harte to his wife)

DEAR ANNA,

CREFELD, January 22, 1879

Mrs. Bayard Taylor has sent

me a book of her late husband's, and a very kind note, and it occurs to me to enclose to you to-day the letter I received from her in answer to one I wrote her after hearing of her husband's death. You remember that I did not feel very kindly towards him, nor had he troubled himself much about me when I came here alone and friendless, but his death choked back my resentment, and what I wrote to her and afterwards in the Tageblatt, I felt very honestly.

I have been several times to the opera at Düsseldorf, and I have been hesitating whether I should slowly prepare you for a great shock or tell you at once that musical Germany is a humbug. It had struck me during the last two months that I had really heard nothing good in the way of music or even as good as I have heard in America, and it was only a week ago that hearing a piano played in an adjoining house, and played badly at that, I was suddenly struck with the fact that it was really the first piano that I had heard in Germany. I have heard orchestras at concerts and military bands; but no better than in America. My first operatic experience was Tannhäuser. I can see your superior smile, Anna, at this; and I know

how you will take my criticism of Wagner, so I don't mind saying plainly, that it was the most diabolically hideous and stupidly monotonous performance I ever heard. I shall say nothing about the orchestral harmonies, for there wasn't anything going on of that kind, unless you call something that seemed like a boiler factory at work in the next street, and the wind whistling through the rigging of a channel steamer, harmony. But I must say one thing! In the third act, I think, Tannhäuser and two other minstrels sing before the King and Court to the accompaniment of their harps and the boiler factory. Each minstrel sang or rather declaimed something like the multiplication table for about twenty minutes. Tannhäuser, when his turn came, declaimed longer, and more lugubriously, and ponderously and monotonously than the others, and went into "nine times nine are eighty-one" and "ten times ten are twenty," when suddenly when he had finished they all drew their swords and rushed at him. I turned to General Von Rauch and said to him that I didn't wonder at it. "Ah," said he, "you know the story then?" "No, not exactly," I replied. "Ja wohl," said Von Rauch," the story is that these minstrels are all singing in praise of Love, but they are furious at Tannhäuser who loves Hilda, the German Venus, for singing in the praise of Love so wildly, so warmly, so passionately!" Then I concluded that I really did not understand Wagner.

But what I wanted to say was that even my poor uneducated ear detected bad instrumentation and worse singing in the choruses. I confided this much to a friend, and he said very frankly that I was probably right, that the best musicians and choruses went to America!

Then I was awfully disappointed in "Faust" or, as it is known here in the playbills, "Marguerite." You know how I love that delicious idyl of Gounod's and I was in my