ll be a new
rendering of Catullus's _Da Basia_.

And so your little forest is for sale. Could I buy that faerie land,
sweetheart, and build therein a hidden house and over its threshold carry
a sweet bride! Ah, you have rewritten the sacred story of Eden. Not for
the love of woman should I be driven from the happy garden, but brought by
woman's grace from the desert into the circle of perfect Paradise.
Together we should hearken to the singing of birds; together, we should
bend over the bruised flowers and look up into the green majesty of the
trees; and sometimes, it might be, as we walked together hand in hand in
the cool of the evening,--sometimes, it might be, we should hear the voice
of our own happiness speaking to us from the shadows and deem that it was
God. May angels and ministers of grace enfold you in their mercy for this
dream of rapture you have given me! It shall feed my imagination in dreams
until I come to you and learn in your arms the more "sober certainty of
waking bliss."

Yet, withal, would you be willing to forego your "brothers," as you call
the trees, and this vision of hidden peace? Would it pain you to leave
them and come with me into this great solitude of people which we call New
York? How in that idyllic retreat should I keep my heart and mind on the
stern purpose I have set before me? There, indeed, the world and all the
concerns of mankind would sink so far from my care, would fade into the
mist of such utter illusion, that I know not how I could write with
seriousness about them. I need not the happiness of love's isolation, but
the rude contact of affairs, yet with love's encouragement, to hold me
within practical ideas. So it seems to me now, but I would not mar the
beauty of your life. Of this and many more things we will talk together
when I come.

I have given up my old comfortable quarters in the----and have taken a
couple of cheap rooms here at----. For some months I shall not be writing
for money and I wished not to eat unnecessarily into my small savings. One
room is a mere closet where I sleep, the other is pretty large, but still
crowded immoderately with my books. I am hard at work on a book I have had
in mind for several years,--the history and significance of
humanitarianism. I need not tell you what the gist of that _magnum opus_
is to be, and, dear sceptic, trust me it will be put into such a form as
to stir up a pother whether with or without ultimate results. I have