ble, you know, is rather a disappointment: it has
never done for humanity what it should have done. I wonder why? Walt
Whitman is going to do a great deal, but he is not quite what I mean.
There is something coming--I don't know just what! I thank God I am a
bookseller, trafficking in the dreams and beauties and curiosities of
humanity rather than some mere huckster of merchandise. But how
helpless we all are when we try to tell what goes on within us! I
found this in one of Lafcadio Hearn's letters the other day--I marked
the passage for you

Baudelaire has a touching poem about an albatross, which you would
like--describing the poet's soul superb in its own free azure--but
helpless, insulted, ugly, clumsy when striving to walk on common
earth--or rather, on a deck, where sailors torment it with tobacco
pipes, etc.

You can imagine what evenings I have here among my shelves, now the
long dark nights are come! Of course until ten o'clock, when I shut up
shop, I am constantly interrupted--as I have been during this letter,
once to sell a copy of Helen's Babies and once to sell The Ballad of
Reading Gaol, so you can see how varied are my clients' tastes! But
later on, after we have had our evening cocoa and Helen has gone to
bed, I prowl about the place, dipping into this and that, fuddling
myself with speculation. How clear and bright the stream of the mind
flows in those late hours, after all the sediment and floating trash of
the day has drained off! Sometimes I seem to coast the very shore of
Beauty or Truth, and hear the surf breaking on those shining sands.
Then some offshore wind of weariness or prejudice bears me away again.
Have you ever come across Andreyev's Confessions of a Little Man During
Great Days? One of the honest books of the War. The Little Man ends
his confession thus--

My anger has left me, my sadness returned, and once more the tears
flow. Whom can I curse, whom can I judge, when we are all alike
unfortunate? Suffering is universal; hands are outstretched to each
other, and when they touch . . . the great solution will come. My
heart is aglow, and I stretch out my hand and cry, "Come, let us join
hands! I love you, I love you!"

And of course, as soon as one puts one's self in that frame of mind
someone comes along and picks your pocket. . . . I suppose we must
teach ourselves to be too proud to mind having our pockets picked!

Did it ever occur to you that the world is