tials, and then come back hither to remove Mrs. Lowell, who is better, but not yet able to leave her bed. However, the Senate have not acted on me yet, so I may not come after all. .. IX 1880-1885 IN LONDON.- - VACATION TOUR TO GERMANY AND ITALY.DEATH OF MRS. LOWELL.-DEPARTURE FROM ENGLAND. LETTERS TO C. E. NORTON, H. W. LONGFELLOW, MRS. W. E. DARWIN, R. W. GILDER, JOHN W. FIELD, T. B. ALDRICH, W. D. HOWELLS, F. J. CHILD, J. B. THAYER, GEORGE PUTNAM, MRS. W. K. CLIFFORD, O. W. HOLMES, MISS GRACE NORTON. TO C. E. NORTON 37 Lowndes St., S. W., Aug. 17, 1880. ... I find that you have been very lenient in your judg ment on my poems and have used a far finer [sic] sieve than I should have chosen if I had done the sifting. They always make me sad, thinking how much better I might have done if in the early years I had improvised less, and if in the later other avocations and studies had not made my hand more clumsy through want of use, than it might have been had I kept more closely to verse and to the mood which that implies. But it is something that three such friends as you and George Curtis and Child should still retain a certain amount of interest in what I have written. I not only approve, but shall perhaps go further if I once begin. The ques tion was simply one of leaving out anything-for the terrible manet litera scripta was staring me in the face, and positively made me unwilling to reprint at all. By the way, I spent Sunday with Mr. Leveson Gower (Lord Granville's brother and a charming host), and coming in from out of doors came upon John Bright reading aloud from the "Commemoration Ode." It sounded better than I feared-but when I am asked to read I never can find anything that seems to me good enough. . . . TO H. W. LONGFELLOW 37 Lowndes St., S. W., Oct. 3, 1880. My dear Longfellow,-I have just been reading, with a feeling I will not mar by trying to express it, your "Ultima Thule." You will understand the pang of pleasurable homesickness it gave me. I cannot praise it better than by saying that it is like you from the first line to the last. Never was your hand firmer. If Gil Blas had been your secretary he never need have lost his place. I haven't a Dante by me, and my memory is in a very dilapidated state, but you will remember the passage I am thinking of, where the old poet in Purgatory says to him, Or sei tu colui, and so on. Io mi son uno che quando Amor mi spira is a part of it. If I could only drop into your study as I used, I should call you "old fellow," as we do boys, without any reckoning of years in it, and tell you that you had misreckoned the height of the sun, and were not up with Ultima Thule by a good many degrees yet. Do such fruits grow there? But you have made me more homesick than ever, and I feel like the Irishman whose friend was carrying him for a wager up to the roof on a ladder—“ Begorra, whin you were at the thurrud story I had hopes!" So I begin to think it wouldn't be so bad if Hancock were elected-for he would recall me. I like my present life as Touchstone did his in the forest. However, I dare say Garfield will have somebody he would like to send in my place. I hope the Club still persists. I have never found such good society and don't expect it. I forwarded to you yesterday a box containing a drawing of the Minnehaha Fall by Lord Dufferin. It goes to the care of the State Department, which I thought would save trouble. I hope it will arrive safely. Good-by, hoist sail again without delay, and correct your geography. You are sure of a welcome in every port. Affectionately yours, J. R. L. TO MRS. W. E. DARWIN London, Oct. 10, 1880. As you intervened unofficially (or benevolently, as we diplomatists say) in the affair of the Workingmen's College, I have the honor to report that I have fulfilled your instructions by talking to the unfortunate youth who compose the Body-as the teachers do the Soulof that excellent institution. That part of Dogberry's charge to the watch in which he inculcates the duty of "comprehending all vagrom men," seems to me a very fair expression of the painful position in which a quasi compulsory audience is placed by itinerant lecturers. But some pity is also due to the unfortunate creature who is obliged to inflict his particular form of aphasia (isn't that the word?) upon them. As for me, who value my own wisdom less the older I grow, and who found it absolutely impossible to prepare anything, I shall not attempt to pathologize for you the pangs I underwent. When I saw directly under me a row of eight reporters, I was abashed by the feeling that I was decanting my emptiness into a huge ear-trumpet which communicated with the four winds of heaven, whose duty it would be to bear every idle word I uttered to the uttermost parts of the earth. If you had been there, you would have swallowed it all without a wry face, and would have told me afterwards that it was a "splendid success," with that sweet partiality which characterizes all your sex. and which is one of the few things that make life endurable to its victims. I did not quite break down—but I heard several ominous cracks under me as I hurried over the slender and shaky bridge which led from my exordium to my peroration. ... TO R. W. GILDER Legation of the United States, Dear Mr. Gilder, -Your telegram scared me, for, coming at an unusual hour, I thought it brought ill news from Washington.* My relief on finding it innocent has perhaps made me too good-natured towards * Of President Garfield's condition. |