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.

X. VARIOUS PREFERENCES