came back upon the publisher’s hands. I
imagine these copies were “ground up”
in the manner of worthless stock, for I saw a single
example of the book quoted the other day in a book-seller’s
catalogue at ten dollars, and I infer that it is so
rare as to be prized at least for its rarity.
It was a very pretty little book, printed on tinted
paper then called “blush,” in the trade,
and it was manufactured in the same office where we
had once been boys together, unknown to each other.
Another boy of that time had by this time become foreman
in the office, and he was very severe with us about
the proofs, and sent us hurting messages on the margin.
Perhaps he thought we might be going to take on airs,
and perhaps we might have taken on airs if the fate
of our book had been different. As it was I really
think we behaved with sufficient meekness, and after
thirty four or five years for reflection I am still
of a very modest mind about my share of the book,
in spite of the price it bears in the book-seller’s
catalogue. But I have steadily grown in liking
for my friend’s share in it, and I think that
there is at present no American of twenty-three writing
verse of so good a quality, with an ideal so pure and
high, and from an impulse so authentic as John J.
Piatt’s were then. He already knew how
to breathe into his glowing rhyme the very spirit of
the region where we were both native, and in him the
Middle West has its true poet, who was much more than
its poet, who had a rich and tender imagination, a
lovely sense of color, and a touch even then securely
and fully his own. I was reading over his poems
in that poor little book a few days ago, and wondering
with shame and contrition that I had not at once known
their incomparable superiority to mine. But I
used then and for long afterwards to tax him with
obscurity, not knowing that my own want of simplicity
and directness was to blame for that effect.
My reading from the first was such as to enamour me
of clearness, of definiteness; anything left in the
vague was intolerable to me; but my long subjection
to Pope, while it was useful in other ways, made me
so strictly literary in my point of view that sometimes
I could not see what was, if more naturally approached
and without any technical preoccupation, perfectly
transparent. It remained for another great passion,
perhaps the greatest of my life, to fuse these gyves
in which I was trying so hard to dance, and free me
forever from the bonds which I had spent so much time
and trouble to involve myself in. But I was not
to know that passion for five or six years yet, and
in the mean time I kept on as I had been going, and
worked out my deliverance in the predestined way.
What I liked then was regularity, uniformity, exactness.
I did not conceive of literature as the expression
of life, and I could not imagine that it ought to
be desultory, mutable, and unfixed, even if at the
risk of some vagueness.