een something that it is very difficult for the average man
to comprehend. It is not difficult for the average man to comprehend
that there may be property in a form which genius or talent gives to an
idea. He can see it. It is visible and palpable, this property in an
idea when it is exemplified in a machine, but it is hardly so
apprehensible when it is subtly interfused in literature. Books have
always been looked on somewhat as _ferae naturae_, and if you have ever
preserved pheasants you know that when they fly over your neighbor's
boundaries he may take a pot shot at them. I remember that something
more than thirty years ago Longfellow, my friend and neighbor, asked me
to come and eat a game pie with him. Longfellow's books had been sold in
England by the tens of thousands, and that game pie--and you will
observe the felicity of its being a game pie, _ferae naturae_ always you
see--was the only honorarium he had ever received from this country for
reprinting his works.

I cannot help feeling as I stand here that there is something especially--I
might almost use a cant word and say monumentally--interesting in a meeting
like this. It is the first time that English and American authors, so
far as I know, have come together in any numbers, I was going to say
to fraternize, when I remembered that I ought perhaps to add to
"sororize." We, of course, have no desire, no sensible man in
England or America has any desire, to enforce this fraternization at the
point of the bayonet. Let us go on criticising each other; it is good for
both of us. We Americans have been sometimes charged with being a little
too sensitive; but perhaps a little indulgence may be due to those who
always have their faults told to them, and the reference to whose virtues
perhaps is sometimes conveyed in a foot-note in small print. I think that
both countries have a sufficiently good opinion of themselves to have a
fairly good opinion of each other. They can afford it; and if difficulties
arise between the two countries, as they unhappily may,--and when you
alluded just now to what De Tocqueville said in 1828 you must remember that
it was only thirteen years after our war,--you must remember how long it
has been to get in the thin end of the wedge of International Copyright;
you must remember it took our diplomacy nearly one hundred years to enforce
its generous principle of the alienable allegiance, and that the greater
part of the bitterness which D