to be as little a Stradivarius as I am
a Paganini. It is an eccentric machine, in tune with me for the moment,
because I happen to have hit it in the ringing spot. The book is a new
face appealing to a mirror of the common surface emotions; and the
kitchen rather than the dairy offers an analogy for the real value of
that "top-skim." I have not seen what I consider good in the book once
mentioned among the laudatory notices--except by your dear hand, my Emmy.
Be sure I will stand on guard against the "vaporous generalizations," and
other "tricks" you fear. Now that you are studying Latin for an
occupation--how good and wise it was of Mr. Redworth to propose it!--I
look upon you with awe as a classic authority and critic. I wish I had
leisure to study with you. What I do is nothing like so solid and
durable.

'THE PRINCESS EGERIA' originally (I must have written word of it to
you--I remember the evening off Palermo!) was conceived as a sketch; by
gradations she grew into a sort of semi-Scudery romance, and swelled to
her present portliness. That was done by a great deal of piecing, not to
say puffing, of her frame. She would be healthier and have a chance of
living longer if she were reduced by a reversal of the processes. But how
would the judicious clippings and prickings affect our "pensive public"?
Now that I have furnished a house and have a fixed address, under the
paws of creditors, I feel I am in the wizard-circle of my popularity and
subscribe to its laws or waken to incubus and the desert. Have I been
rash? You do not pronounce. If I have bound myself to pipe as others
please, it need not be entirely; and I can promise you it shall not be;
but still I am sensible when I lift my "little quill" of having forced
the note of a woodland wren into the popular nightingale's--which may end
in the daw's, from straining; or worse, a toy-whistle.

'That is, in the field of literature. Otherwise, within me deep, I am not
aware of any transmutation of the celestial into coined gold. I sound
myself, and ring clear. Incessant writing is my refuge, my solace--escape
out of the personal net. I delight in it, as in my early morning walks at
Lugano, when I went threading the streets and by the lake away to "the
heavenly mount," like a dim idea worming upward in a sleepy head to
bright wakefulness.

'My anonymous critic, of whom I told you, is intoxicating with eulogy.
The signature "Apollonius" appears to be of literary-middle