TŌKYŌ, May, 1898.
DEAR MR. ALBEE,--My best thanks for the "Prose Idyls." The book leaves
on the mind an impression of quiet brightness like that of a New
England summer sky thinly veiled. Three idyls especially linger in
my imagination,--each for a reason all its own. Hawthorne might have
written "The Devil's Bargain:" it is a powerful moral fancy, and the
touch of grotesque humour in it is just enough to keep it from being
out of tone in the gallery of optimist studies. "The Family Mirror" is
haunting: the whole effect, to my notion, being brought out by that
charming reference to the damaged spot at the back. Then "A Mountain
Maid" much appealed to me by its suggestion of that beautiful and
mysterious _sauvagerie_, as the French call it,--that wholly instinctive
shrinking from caress, which develops with the earliest budding of
womanhood, but which the girl could not herself possibly explain.
Indeed I fancy that only evolutional philosophy can explain it at all.
Analogous conditions in the boy of fourteen or fifteen are well worthy
of study--already I had attempted a little sketch on this subject, which
_may_ be printed some day or other: "A Pair of Eyes."
My next volume will have a series of what I might call _metaphysical
idyls_, perhaps, at its latter end. I fear you will think them too
sombre,--now that I have felt something of the sunshine of your soul.
However, each of us can only give his own tone to the thread which he
contributes to the infinite warp and woof of human thought and emotion.
Is it not so? With kindest regards to Mrs. Albee, very gratefully yours,