My pen has gone dry and the ink is out of reach. Howells, did you
write me day-before-day-before yesterday or did I dream it? In my
mind's eye I most vividly see your hand-write on a square blue
envelope in the mail-pile. I have hunted the house over, but there
is no such letter. Was it an illusion?
I am reading Lowell's letters & smoking. I woke an hour ago & am
reading to keep from wasting the time. On page 305, Vol. I, I have
just margined a note:
“Young friend! I like that! You ought to see him now.”
It seemed startlingly strange to hear a person call you young. It
was a brick out of a blue sky, & knocked me groggy for a moment. Ah
me, the pathos of it is that we were young then. And he--why, so
was he, but he didn't know it. He didn't even know it 9 years
later, when we saw him approaching and you warned me, saying:
“Don't say anything about age--he has just turned 50 & thinks he is
old, & broods over it.”
Well, Clara did sing! And you wrote her a dear letter.
Time to go to sleep.
Yours ever,
MARK
The second letter, begun at 10 A.M., outlines the plan by which he is
to write on the subject uppermost in his mind without restraint, knowing
that the letter is not to be mailed.
...The scheme furnishes a definite target for each letter, & you
can choose the target that's going to be the most sympathetic for
what you are hungering & thirsting to say at that particular moment.
And you can talk with a quite unallowable frankness & freedom
because you are not going to send the letter. When you are on fire
with theology you'll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn't be an
inspiration; you'll write it to Twichell, because it will make him
writhe and squirm & break the furniture. When you are on fire with
a good thing that's indecent you won't waste it on Twichell; you'll
save it for Howells, who will love it. As he will never see it you
can make it really indecenter than he could stand; & so no harm is
done, yet a vast advantage is gained.
The letter was not finished, and the scheme perished there. The Twichell
letter concerned missionaries, and added nothing to what he had already
said on the subject.
He wrote no letter to Mr. Rogers--perhaps never wrote to him again.