The prospect here alluded to of a cheap edition of the little
travel-books did not get realised. The volume of essays in the
printer's hands was _Virginibus Puerisque_. I do not know what were
the pages in broad Scots copied by way of enclosure.
_Hotel Belvedere, Davos, [December 1880]._
DEAR CHARLES WARREN STODDARD,--Many thanks to you for the letter and the
photograph. Will you think it mean if I ask you to wait till there
appears a promised cheap edition? Possibly the canny Scot does feel
pleasure in the superior cheapness; but the true reason is this, that I
think to put a few words, by way of notes, to each book in its new form,
because that will be the Standard Edition, without which no g.'s l.[34]
will be complete. The edition, briefly, _sine qua non_. Before that, I
shall hope to send you my essays, which are in the printer's hands. I
look to get yours soon. I am sorry to hear that the Custom House has
proved fallible, like all other human houses and customs. Life consists
of that sort of business, and I fear that there is a class of man, of
which you offer no inapt type, doomed to a kind of mild, general
disappointment through life. I do not believe that a man is the more
unhappy for that. Disappointment, except with one's self, is not a very
capital affair; and the sham beatitude, "Blessed is he that expecteth
little," one of the truest, and in a sense, the most Christlike things
in literature.
Alongside of you, I have been all my days a red cannon ball of
dissipated effort; here I am by the heels in this Alpine valley, with
just so much of a prospect of future restoration as shall make my
present caged estate easily tolerable to me--shall or should, I would
not swear to the word before the trial's done. I miss all my objects in
the meantime; and, thank God, I have enough of my old, and maybe
somewhat base philosophy, to keep me on a good understanding with myself
and Providence.
The mere extent of a man's travels has in it something consolatory. That
he should have left friends and enemies in many different and distant
quarters gives a sort of earthly dignity to his existence. And I think
the better of myself for the belief that I have left some in California
interested in me and my successes. Let me assure you, you who have made
friends already among such various and distant races, that there is a
certain phthisical Scot who will always be pleased to hear good news of
you, and would be better pleased by nothing than to learn that you had
thrown off your present incubus, largely consisting of letters I
believe, and had sailed into some square work by way of change.
And by way of change in itself, let me copy on the other pages some
broad Scotch I wrote for you when I was ill last spring in Oakland. It
is no muckle worth: but ye should na look a gien horse in the
moo'.--Yours ever,