I HAVE lately discovered that Master Harry Sandford of England, the priggish little boy in the story of "Sandford and Merton," has a worthy American cousin in one Elsie Dinsmore, who sedately pirouettes through a seemingly end-less succession of girls' books. I came across a nest of fifteen of them the other day. This impossible female is carried from infancy up to grandmotherhood, and is, I believe, still lei-surely pursuing her way down to the tomb in an ecstatic state of uninterrupted didacticism. There are twenty-five volumes of her and the grand-daughter, who is also christened Elsie, and is her grandmother's own child, with the same preco-cious readiness to dispense ethical instruction to her elders. An interesting instance of hereditary talent!
H-----'s intellect resembles a bamboo--slender, graceful, and hollow. Personally, he is long and narrow, and looks as if he might have been the product of a rope-walk. He is loosely put together, like an ill-constructed sentence, and affects me like one. His figure is ungrammatical.
AMERICAN humor is nearly as ephemeral as the flowers that bloom in the spring. Each gen-eration has its own crop, and, as a rule, insists on cultivating a new kind. That of 1860, if it were to break into blossom at the present moment, would probably be left to fade upon the stem.
Humor is a delicate shrub, with the passing hectic flush of its time. The current-topic variety is especially subject to very early frosts, as is also the dialectic species. Mark Twain's humor is not to be classed with the fragile plants; it has a serious root striking deep down into rich earth, and I think it will go on flowering indefinitely.
I HAVE been imagining an ideal critical journal, whose plan should involve the discharge of the chief literary critic and the installment of a fresh censor on the completion of each issue. To place a man in permanent absolute control of a certain number of pages, in which to express his opinions, is to place him in a position of great personal danger, It is almost inevitable that he should come to overrate the importance of those opinions, to take himself with far too much seriousness, and in the end adopt the dogma of his own infallibility. The liberty to summon this or that man-of-letters to a supposititious bar of justice is apt to beget in the self-ap-pointed judge an exaggerated sense of superi-ority. He becomes impatient of any rulings not his, and says in effect, if not in so many words:
" I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips let no dog bark." When the critic reaches this exalted frame of mind his slight usefulness is gone.
AFTER a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.
I LIKE to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings. The partly draped statue has a charm which the nude lacks. Who would have those marble folds slip from the raised knee of the Venus of Melos? Hawthorne knew how to make his lovely thought lovelier by sometimes half veiling it.
I HAVE just tested the nib of a new pen on a slight fancy which Herrick has handled twice in the "Hesperides." The fancy, however, is not Herrick's; it is as old as poetry and the ex-aggeration of lovers, and I have the same privi-lege as another to try my fortune with it:
UP ROOS THE SONNE, AND UP ROOS EMELYE
CHAUCER
When some hand has partly drawn The cloudy curtains of her bed, And my lady's golden head Glimmers in the dusk like dawn, Then methinks is day begun.
Later, when her dream has ceased And she softly stirs and wakes, Then it is as when the East A sudden rosy magic takes From the cloud-enfolded sun, And full day breaks!
Shakespeare, who has done so much to discour-age literature by anticipating everybody, puts the whole matter into a nutshell:
But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
THERE is a phrase spoken by Hamlet which I
have seen quoted innumerable times, and never once correctly. Hamlet, addressing Horatio, says:
Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core, ay, in my <i>heart of heart</i>.
The words italicized are invariably written "heart of hearts"--as if a person possessed that organ in duplicate. Perhaps no one living, with the exception of Sir Henry Irving, is more familiar with the play of Hamlet than my good friend Mr. Bram Stoker, who makes his heart plural on two occasions in his recent novel, "The Mystery of the Sea." Mrs. Humphry Ward also twice misquotes the passage in "Lady Rose's Daughter."
BOOKS that have become classics--books that ave had their day and now get more praise than perusal--always remind me of venerable colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired upon half pay.
WHETHER or not the fretful porcupine rolls itself into a ball is a subject over which my friend John Burroughs and several brother naturalists have lately become as heated as if the question involved points of theology. Up among the Adirondacks, and in the very heart of the re-gion of porcupines, I happen to have a modest cottage. This retreat is called The Porcupine, and I ought by good rights to know something about the habits of the small animal from which it derives its name. Last winter my dog Buster used to return home on an average of three times a month from an excursion up Mt. Pisgah with his nose stuck full of quills, and <i>he</i> ought to have some concrete ideas on the subject. We two, then, are prepared to testify that the por-cupine in its moments of relaxation occasion-ally contracts itself into what might be taken for a ball by persons not too difficult to please in the matter of spheres. But neither Buster nor I--being unwilling to get into trouble--would like to assert that it is an actual ball.
