ifling,
should be shown through the colored glass of the writer's personality.
What concerns you is not what happened, but what relations the
happening bears to you and your correspondent.

When once the personal vein is struck, nothing is so easy as to find a
theme for a letter. The materials are only too plentiful if the eyes
and heart are open to receive them. Stevenson wrote that he scarcely
pulled a weed in his garden without pondering some fit phrase to
report the fact to his friend Colvin, and we may be sure that the weed
was not allowed to wither, but when it was transplanted, flourished
again and reached its destination in a veritable Pot of Basil. No
great events are necessary; the plainest incident, the morning's
shopping, is as good as a Pan-American exposition for ideas to
crystallize about, since exactly in proportion as an event is embedded
in opinion, comment, and feeling, must its value as an epistolary item
be rated. While the born letter-writer is driving a nail or polishing
a shoe, a thought apropos of his occupation or of stars, perhaps,
drops complete and perfect like ripe fruit in an orchard. It matters
little; seen through the eyes of a friend, all homely things are
invested with an extrinsic interest and a new glory not their own.

... By the very nature of the composition a mean man cannot possibly
write a good letter. When we cast about for a perfect exemplar of the
epistolary style, we must of necessity look among the high-souled
men--Cowper, Lamb, FitzGerald, Hearn--for where else shall we find one
to stand the test of self-revelation? Happily, one of the blithest,
manliest, completest spirits of our times was a matchless writer of
letters--Stevenson. Aching for absolute honesty of style and making
clearness almost synonomous with good morals, he has given us in the
Vailima collection and in the two larger volumes of his correspondence
an almost unexampled self-revelation. The man Stevenson is _in_ them,
"his essence and his sting." The grip of his hand and the look of his
eye lose none of their force in the transparent medium through which
they are constrained to pass. Knowing that a man who constantly gives
his best finds his best constantly growing better, he never hoarded
his ideas for publication, but poured his intellectual riches into a
note to a friend as freely as if each line were coining him gold. It
results that the lover of Stevenson would almost prefer to give up all
the roma