Too Sharp a Joke

think in almost all points. It is very witty and, as the English say, "amazingly clever." Once or twice you were biassed by friendships (how can one help being? it is so graceful an error) and once by prejudice; but you know this really as well as I. There is but one thing I regretted, and that was that you drove your arrow so sharply through Miranda.1 The joke of "Tiring-woman to the Muses" is too happy; but because fate has really been unkind to her, and because she depends on her pen for her bread-andwater (and that is nearly all she has to eat), and because she is her own worst enemy, and because through her disappointment and disease, which (things) embitter every one, she has struggled most stoutly and manfully, I could have wished you had let her pass scot-free. Butler at rhymes, and every body at puns.

But you beat

The Brownings and we became great friends in Florence, and of course we could not become friends without liking each other. He, Emelyn says, is like you — judge from this portrait? He is of my size, but slighter, with straight black hair, small eyes, wide apart, which he twitches constantly together, a smooth face, a slightly aquiline nose, and manners nervous and rapid. He has a great vivacity, but not the least humour, some sarcasm, considerable critical faculty, and very great frankness and friendliness of manner and mind. Mrs. Browning used to sit buried up in a large easy chair, listening and talking very quietly and pleasantly, with nothing of that peculiarity which one would expect from reading her poems. eyes are small, her mouth large, she wears a cap and long curls. Very unaffected and pleasant and simple-hearted is she, and Browning says "her poems are the least good part of her."... Once in a while I write verses, and I think I have written better here than ever before which

1 The name under which Margaret Fuller was satirized.

Her

is not perhaps saying much. I have hundreds of statues in my head to make, but they are in the future tense.

Powers I knew very well in Florence. He is a man of great mechanical talent and natural strength of perception, but with no poetry in his composition, and I think no creative power. When I compare him to Page I feel his inferiority; and, after all, I have met very few, if any, persons who affect me so truly as men of genius as Page. Certainly there are few artists like him.

I

November 28, 1848

HAD half a mind yesterday, when I received your volume, to practise upon you the old General Washington dodge-pardon the irreverential word-of thanking the donor before reading the book. But, unluckily for my plot, I happened to get my finger between the leaves, as Mr. Alworthy got his into the hand of Tom Jones, and felt the warm, soft pressure; and it was all over with me. My wife, coming in at this juncture of affairs, was in like manner caught; and we sat and read all the afternoon, till we had gone over all the new, and most of the old, which is as good as new, and finally drained "the punch bowl" between us, and shared the glass of cold water which serves as cul-de-lampe to the volume, and said, "It is divine!"

Take thy place, O poet, among the truest, the wittiest, the tenderest, among the

"bards that sung

Divine ideas below,

That always find us young,

And always keep us so."

This is the desire and prophecy of your friend.

Adjudged a Failure

66

Catharine Sedgwick has grave doubts about The House of the Seven Gables "

YOUR

(To Mrs. K. S. Minot)

LENOX, May 4, 1851

JOUR mother, after reading Hawthorne's book ["The House of the Seven Gables"], has most kindly and patiently gone straight through it again in loud reading to your father and me. Your father is not a model listener; ten thousand thoughts of ten thousand things to be done call him off, and would wear out any temper but your mother's. Have you read it? There is marvellous beauty in the diction; a richness and originality of thought that give the stamp of unquestionable genius; a microscopic observation of the external world, and the keenest analysis of character; and elegance and finish that is like the work of a master sculptor- perfect in its artistic details. And yet, to my mind, it is a failure. It fails in the essentials of a work of art; there is not essential dignity in the characters to make them worth the labor spent on them. A low-minded vulgar hypocrite, a weak-minded nervous old maid, and her half-cracked brother, with nothing but beauty, and a blind instinctive love of the beautiful, are the chief characters of the drama. "Little Phœbe" is the redemption, as far as she goes, of the book a sweet and perfect flower amidst corruption, barrenness, and decay. The book is an affliction. It affects me like a passage through the wards of an insane asylum, or a visit to specimens of morbid anatomy. It has the unity and simple construction of a Greek tragedy, but without the relief of divine qualities or great events; and the man takes such savage delight in repeating and repeating the raw head and bloody bones of his imagina

tion.

There is nothing genial, excepting always little Phoebe, the ideal of a New England, sweet-tempered, "accomplishing" village girl. I might have liked it better when I was younger, but as we go through the tragedy of life we need elixirs, cordials, and all the kindliest resources of the art of fiction. There is too much force for the subject. It is as if a railroad should be built and a locomotive started to transport skeletons, specimens, and one bird of Paradise! . . .

DEAR

(To Charles Sumner)

EAR SUMNER, —I have just had your letter read to me on a half-sick bed, and get up redolent of magnesia and roasted apples, to embrace you for your Burkeism generally, and for your extracts and references.

I hope you review Burke in the N[orth] A[merican Review], though I have not got it and do not say so. Mind that he is the fourth Englishman,- Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, Burke. I hope you take one hundred pages for the article. Compare, contrast, with Cicero, both knowing all things, - but God knows where to end on Burke. No Englishman or countryman of ours has the least appreciation of Burke. The Whigs never forgave the last eight or ten years of that life of glory, and the Tories never forgave what preceded; and we poor, unidealized democrats, do not understand his marvellous English, universal wisdom, illuminated, omniscient mind, and are afraid of his principles. What coxcombical rascal is it that thinks Bolingbroke a better writer? Take page by page the allusions, the felicities, the immortalities of truth, variety, reason, height, depth, everything,- Boling

broke is a voluble prater to Burke !

An Electric Bath

Amplify on his letter in reply to the Duke of Bedford. How mournful, melodious, Cassandra-like! Out of Burke might be cut 50 Mackintoshes, 175 Macaulays, 40 Jeffreys, and 250 Sir Robert Peels, and leave him greater than Pitt and Fox together.

I seem to suppose your article is not written,—as I hope it is.

...

Yours truly,

R. C.

John G. Whittier feels uncomfortable while reading Browning

(To Lucy Larcom, 1855)

ELIZABE

LIZABETH has been reading Browning's poem and she tells me it is great. I have only dipped into it, here and there, but it is not exactly comfortable reading. It seemed to me like a galvanic battery in full play — its spasmodic utterances and intense passion makes me feel as if I had taken a bath among electric eels.

William Wetmore Story writes to Charles Eliot Norton after Mrs. Browning's death

THE

[DIABLERETS, Aug. 15, 1861] HE funeral was not impressive, as it ought to have been. She was buried in the Protestant cemetery where Theodore Parker lies; many of her friends were there, but fewer persons than I expected and hoped to see. The services were blundered through by a fat English parson in a brutally careless way, and she was consigned by him to the earth as if her clay were no better than any other clay. . . She is a great loss to literature, to Italy and to the world - the greatest poet among