“You sent me the ‘Reader’ with a notice of the book, and I have received one or two others, one of them from Bennoch.  The English critics seem to think me very bitter against their countrymen, and it is, perhaps, natural that they should, because their self-conceit can accept nothing short of indiscriminate adulation; but I really think that Americans have more cause than they to complain of me.  Looking over the volume, I am rather surprised to find that whenever I draw a comparison between the two people, I almost invariably cast the balance against ourselves.  It is not a good nor a weighty book, nor does it deserve any great amount either of praise or censure.  I don’t care about seeing any more notices of it.”

Meantime the “Dolliver Romance,” which had been laid aside on account of the exciting scenes through which we were then passing, and which unfitted him for the composition of a work of the imagination, made little progress.  In a note written to me at this time he says:—­

“I can’t tell you when to expect an instalment of the Romance, if ever.  There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin.  I linger at the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantasms to be encountered if I enter.  I wish God had given me the faculty of writing a sunshiny book.”

I invited him to come to Boston and have a cheerful week among his old friends, and threw in as an inducement a hint that he should hear the great organ in the Music Hall.  I also suggested that we could talk over the new Romance together, if he would gladden us all by coming to the city.  Instead of coming, he sent this reply:—­

“I thank you for your kind invitation to hear the grand instrument; but it offers me no inducement additional to what I should always have for a visit to your abode.  I have no ear for an organ or a jewsharp, nor for any instrument between the two; so you had better invite a worthier guest, and I will come another time.

“I don’t see much probability of my having the first chapter of the Romance ready so soon as you want it.  There are two or three chapters ready to be written, but I am not yet robust enough to begin, and I feel as if I should never carry it through.

“Besides, I want to prefix a little sketch of Thoreau to it, because, from a tradition which he told me about this house of mine, I got the idea of a deathless man, which is now taking a shape very different from the original one.  It seems the duty of a live literary man to perpetuate the memory of a dead one, when there is such fair opportunity as in this case:  but how Thoreau would scorn me for thinking that I could perpetuate him!  And I don’t think so.

“I can think of no title for the unborn Romance.  Always heretofore I have waited till it was quite complete before attempting to name it, and I fear I shall have to do so now.