Now, is that taken from your book?  No—­but from my book, which holds my verses as I write them; and as I open it, I read that.

And speaking of verse—­somebody gave me a few days ago that Mr. Lowell’s book you once mentioned to me.  Anyone who ‘admires’ you shall have my sympathy at once—­even though he do change the laughing wine-mark into a ‘stain’ in that perfectly beautiful triplet—­nor am I to be indifferent to his good word for myself (though not very happily connected with the criticism on the epithet in that ’Yorkshire Tragedy’—­which has better things, by the way—­seeing that ‘white boy,’ in old language, meant just ‘good boy,’ a general epithet, as Johnson notices in the life of Dryden, whom the schoolmaster Busby was used to class with his ’white boys’—­this is hypercriticism, however).  But these American books should not be reprinted here—­one asks, what and where is the class to which they address themselves? for, no doubt, we have our congregations of ignoramuses that enjoy the profoundest ignorance imaginable on the subjects treated of; but these are evidently not the audience Mr. Lowell reckons on; rather, if one may trust the manner of his setting to work, he would propound his doctrine to the class.  Always to be found, of spirits instructed up to a certain height and there resting—­vines that run up a prop and there tangle and grow to a knot—­which want supplying with fresh poles; so the provident man brings his bundle into the grounds, and sticks them in laterally or a-top of the others, as the case requires, and all the old stocks go on growing again—­but here, with us, whoever wanted Chaucer, or Chapman, or Ford, got him long ago—­what else have Lamb, and Coleridge, and Hazlitt and Hunt and so on to the end of their generations ... what else been doing this many a year?  What one passage of all these, cited with the very air of a Columbus, but has been known to all who know anything of poetry this many, many a year?  The others, who don’t know anything, are the stocks that have got to shoot, not climb higher—­compost, they want in the first place!  Ford’s and Crashaw’s rival Nightingales—­why they have been dissertated on by Wordsworth and Coleridge, then by Lamb and Hazlitt, then worked to death by Hunt, who printed them entire and quoted them to pieces again, in every periodical he was ever engaged upon; and yet after all, here ‘Philip’—­’must read’ (out of a roll of dropping papers with yellow ink tracings, so old!) something at which ‘John’ claps his hands and says ’Really—­that these ancients should own so much wit &c.’!  The passage no longer looks its fresh self after this veritable passage from hand to hand:  as when, in old dances, the belle began the figure with her own partner, and by him was transferred to the next, and so to the next—­they ever beginning with all the old alacrity and spirit; but she bearing a still-accumulating weight of tokens of gallantry, and none the better for every fresh pushing and shoving and pulling and hauling—­till, at the bottom of the room—­