no," our complementary self replied. "But difficult."

XIV

THE MAGAZINE MUSE

Two aging if not aged poets, one much better if not much older than the
other, were talking of the Muse as she was in their day and of the Muse
as she is in this. At the end, their common mind was that she was a far
more facile Muse formerly than she is now. In other words, as the elder
and better poet put it, they both decided that many, many pieces of
verse are written in these times, and hidden away in the multitude of
the magazines, which in those times would have won general recognition
if not reputation for the authors; they would have been remembered from
month to month, and their verses copied into the newspapers from the two
or three periodicals then published, and, if they were not enabled to
retire upon their incomes, they would have been in the enjoyment of a
general attention beyond anything money can buy at the present day. This
conclusion was the handsomer in the two poets, because they had nothing
to gain and something to lose by it if their opinion should ever become
known. It was in a sort the confession of equality, and perhaps even
inferiority, which people do not make, unless they are obliged to it, in
any case. But these poets were generous even beyond their unenvious
tribe, and the younger, with a rashness which his years measurably
excused, set about verifying his conviction in a practical way, perhaps
the only practical way.

He asked his publishers to get him all the American magazines published;
and has the home-keeping reader any notion of the vastness of the sea on
which this poet had embarked in his daring exploration? His publishers
sent him a list of some eighty-two monthly periodicals in all kinds,
which, when he had begged them to confine it to the literary kind, the
aesthetic kind only, amounted to some fifty. By far the greater number of
these, he found, were published in New York, but two were from
Philadelphia, one from Boston, one from Indianapolis, and one even from
Chicago; two were from the Pacific Slope generally. That is to say, in
this city there are issued every month about forty-five magazines
devoted to belles-lettres, of varying degrees of excellence, not always
connoted by their varying prices. Most of them are of the ten-cent
variety, and are worth in most cases ten cents, and in a few cases
twenty-five or thirty-five cents, quite like those which ask such sums
for themselves. The