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, 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. .

- we were

(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 in

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. I hope it was not too intime, for I don't like to wear my heart on my sleeve. The more I feel, the less I say about it. .

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

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)

CREFELD, January 22, 1879

[Y DEAR ANNA,— 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

Magnificent Acting

seat that night long before the curtain went up. Before the first act was over I felt like leaving, and yet I was glad I stayed. For although the chorus of villagers was frightful, and Faust and Mephistopheles spouted and declaimed blank verse at each other whole pages of Goethe, yet the acting was good. The music was a little better in the next act, and the acting was superb. I have never seen such a Marguerite! From the time she first meets Faust with that pert rebuke until the final scenes she was perfect. The prayer in the church — the church interior represented with kneeling figures and service going on - such as they dare not represent in England — was most wonderful. I can see her yet, passing from one to another of the kneeling groups as the women draw away from her, and as she knelt in a blind groping way with her fingers mechanically turning the leaves of her prayer-book, and the voice of Mephistopheles mingling with the music, until, with one wild shriek she threw the book away. Then it was that I jumped up in my seat and applauded. But think of my coming to Germany to hear opera badly sung, and magnificently acted!

I saw Der Freischütz after this, but it was not so well acted, and awfully sung. Yet the scenery was wonderfully good and the costumes historically perfect. The audiences from Cologne to Düsseldorf are all the same, stiff, formal, plainly dressed, all except the officers. The opera audience at Cologne look like an American prayer-meeting.

I have written Frankie and Wodie. Unless my lecture tour is postponed, I shall not write you again until I get to London. And then I shall be so busy I can only give you the news of success. - God bless you all.

FRANK

II

(Sidney Lanier to his wife)

NEW YORK, August 15, 1870

H, how they have belied Wagner! I heard

AH Theodore Thomas' orchestra play his overture

to "Tannhäuser." The "Music of the Future" is surely thy music and my music. Each harmony was a chorus of pure aspirations. The sequences flowed along, one after another, as if all the great and noble deeds of time had formed a procession and marched in review before one's ears, instead of one's eyes. These "great and noble deeds" were not deeds of war and statesmanship, but majestic victories of inner struggles of a man. This unbroken march of beautiful-bodied Triumphs irresistibly invites the soul of a man to create other processions like it. I would I might lead a so magnificent file of glories into heaven! . . .

IX

THE WIDE, WIDE WORLD

Governor Winthrop bids his wife prepare for an ocean voyage

MY

I wrote to thee by my brother

Y DEARE WIFE, Arthur, but I durst write no more then I need not care though it miscarried, for I found him the olde man still; yet I would have kept him to ease my brother, but that his owne desire to returne, & the scarcitye of provisions heer, yielded the stronger reason to let him goe. Now (my good wife) let us ioyne in praysinge or mercifull God, that (howsoever he hath afflicted us, both generally