And here a few confidential lines for close friends: With
better fortunes when my first London book was out, I had taken
rooms at Museum Street, a few doors from the greatest store-house
of art and history on the globe, and I literally lived in
the British Museum every day. But I had already overtaxed
my strength, and my eyes were paining terribly. Never robust,
I had always abhorred meat; and milk, from a child, had been
my strongest drink. In the chill damp of London you must eat
and drink. I was, without knowing it, starving and working
myself to death. Always and wherever you are, when a hard bit
of work is done, rest and refresh. Go to the fields, woods, to
God and get strong. This is your duty as well as your right.
Letters—sweet, brave, good letters from the learned and
great—were so many I could not read them with my poor eyes
and had to leave them to friends. They found two from the
Archbishop of Dublin. I was to breakfast with him to meet
Browning, Dean Stanley, Houghton, and so on. I went to an
old Jew close by to hire a dress suit, as Franklin had done for
the Court of St. James. While fitting on the clothes I told him
I was in haste to go to a great breakfast. He stopped, looked at
me, looked me all over, and then told me I must not wear that,
but he would hire me a suit of velvet. By degrees, as he fixed
me up, he got at, or guessed at some facts, and when I asked to
pay him he shook his head. I put some money down and he
pushed it back. He said he had a son, his only family now, at
Oxford, and he kept on fixing me up; cane, great, tall silk hat,
gloves and all. Who would have guessed the heart to be found
there?
Browning was just back from Italy, sunburnt and ruddy.
“Robert, you are browning,” smiled Lady Augusta. “And you
are August—a,” bowed the great poet grandly; and, by what
coincidence—he, too, was in brown velvet, and so like my own
that I was a bit uneasy.
Two of the Archbishop's beautiful daughters had been riding
in the park with the Earl of Aberdeen. “And did you gallop?”
asked Browning of the younger beauty. “I galloped, Joyce
galloped, we galloped all three.” Then we all laughed at the
happy and hearty retort, and Browning, beating the time and
clang of galloping horses' feet on the table with his fingers, repeated
the exact measure in Latin from Virgil; and the Archbishop
laughingly took it up, in Latin, where he left off. I then
told Browning I had an order—it was my first—for a poem
from the Oxford Magazine, and would like to borrow the
measure and spirit of his “Good News” for a prairie fire on the
plains, driving buffalo and all other life before it into a river.
“Why not borrow from Virgil, as I did? He is as rich as one
of your gold mines, while I am but a poor scribe.” And this
was my first of inner London.
Fast on top of this came breakfasts with Lord Houghton, lunch
with Browning, a dinner with Rossetti to meet the great painters;
the good old Jew garmenting me always, and always pushing
back the pay.
Let me here note some things my new poets that you should
not do; then some that you must. The random notes of this
book will serve you better than all the letters I could ever
write you. Spend no time or strength finding fault with a
fellow scribe. I know but little of prize fighters or pirates of
the high seas, but from what I am told they are far more
courteous to one another than are American authors, except in
sets and little circles.
If you feel a bitterness my young poet toward some one more
favored at this time than yourself, pray God to send some good
angel to lay you on your back, as is told in the story of Islam's
prophet, and take the black drop from your heart, for it will
make you not only weak and worthless if it remain, but it will
make you certainly miserable. If you cannot learn to see beauty
and love beauty in the life and work of Nature, then, believe
me, you were not born to the sweetness of song. If you must
find faults find them in your own work. I have done this, and
it has kept me busy. Nor shall you to the extent of its newness,
scorn a new character, mistake character for eccentricity. Our
work, the calling of the poet, is the highest under the stars, so
are his triumphs the rarest; and he who would despoil him
would despoil the dead.
Nor shall you bewail the afflictions of your flesh. That is old,
old; and has been done perfectly. The man who intrudes the
weakness of his body is a bore. Let him, if he must, sing the
weakness of his mind. But when “he putteth off his armor,”
then, and not till then, may he tell the pain and peril of his
fight.
This poem, “Kit Carson,” was not in any of my four first
books, and so has not been rightly revised till now. It was too
long for the tumultuous and swift action; and then the end was
coarse and unworthy the brave spirit of Kit Carson. I have
here cut and changed it much; as I cut and changed all the
matter of my three preceding books in London when I cut and
compressed all I had done worth preserving into the Songs of
the Sierras.