collect introductiolorums for me.

Distinguo: 1. _Silverado_ was not written in America, but in
Switzerland's icy mountains. 2. What you read is the bleeding and
disembowelled remains of what I wrote. 3. The good stuff is all to
come--so I think. "The Sea Fogs," "The Hunter's Family," "Toils and
Pleasures"--_belles pages_.--Yours ever,

RAMNUGGER.

O!--Seeley is too clever to live, and the book a gem. But why has he
read too much Arnold? Why will he avoid--obviously avoid--fine writing
up to which he has led? This is a winking, curled-and-oiled,
ultra-cultured, Oxford-don sort of an affectation that infuriates my
honest soul. "You see"--they say--"how unbombastic _we_ are; we come
right up to eloquence, and, when it's hanging on the pen, dammy, we
scorn it!" It is literary Deronda-ism. If you don't want the woman, the
image, or the phrase, mortify your vanity and avoid the appearance of
wanting them.

TO W.E. HENLEY

The first paragraph of the following refers to contributions of R. L.
S. to the Magazine of Art under Mr. Henley's editorship:--

_La Solitude, Hyeres [Autumn 1883]._

DEAR LAD,--Glad you like _Fontainebleau_. I am going to be the means,
under heaven, of aerating or literating your pages. The idea that
because a thing is a picture-book all the writing should be on the wrong
tack is _triste_ but widespread. Thus _Hokusai_ will be really a gossip
on convention, or in great part. And the Skelt will be as like a Charles
Lamb as I can get it. The writer should write, and not illustrate
pictures: else it's bosh....

Your remarks about the ugly are my eye. Ugliness is only the prose of
horror. It is when you are not able to write _Macbeth_ that you write
_Therese Raquin_. Fashions are external: the essence of art only varies
in so far as fashion widens the field of its application; art is a mill
whose thirlage, in different ages, widens and contracts; but, in any
case and under any fashion, the great man produces beauty, terror, and
mirth, and the little man produces cleverness (personalities,
psychology) instead of beauty, ugliness instead of terror, and jokes
instead of mirth. As it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be ever,
world without end. Amen!

And even as you read, you say, "Of course, _quelle rengaine_!"

R. L. S.

TO W. H. LOW

Manhattan mentioned below is the name of a short-lived New York
magazine, the editor of which had asked through