Class "T'S ^^^1, 
 Book J\._L_ 
 
 Copyright N". 
 
 COFVRICHT DEPOSIT. 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 IS^tlUam laaugi^n jwootit 
 
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 I869-I9IO 
 
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SOME LETTERS 
 
 OF 
 
 3^tlliam "^augfjn JHooti? 
 
 EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION 
 
 BY 
 
 DANIEL GREGORY MASON 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 (3Ct)e Vii'ozv^itit pxt9^ Cambriboe 
 
 1913 
 
I «^ A> -i 
 
 J^ 
 
 COPYRIGHT, I913, BY DANIEL GREGORY MASON 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published October 1Q13 
 
 '^CI.A357158 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 "He liberates the imagination with his prose," 
 wrote one of Moody's friends when the project of col- 
 lecting some of the letters was being discussed, "as 
 effectively as he does with his poetry. And then besides 
 there is the luminous personality which emerges from 
 every folded sheet, looking out with large veiled eyes." 
 The comment happily describes the double interest of 
 these letters. They are, first of all, literature, and may 
 be read, by those who know nothing of the personality 
 of their author, for their purely literary charm, their 
 power to "liberate the imagination." They carry, like 
 his poetry, for such a reader, their own rich gifts 
 of delight; they are as magnanimously conceived, as 
 hauntingly phrased, as eloquently and ingeniously 
 clothed in metaphor, even more mischievously touched 
 with humor. Moody's poetry is destined, surely, to a 
 high, if not to the supreme, place in the American 
 poetry of his generation. His letters, it seems to me, 
 are worthy to stand beside it; and there, so far as their 
 purely literary quality is concerned, they may be left 
 without further comment. 
 
 But like all good letters they are not only literature 
 but self-revelation; and the clear vision of this more 
 individual element may be helped not only by the 
 large illumination shed upon them from the poetry, 
 but by the countless casual side-lights that only per- 
 
 V 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 sonal acquaintance can note and interpret. The two 
 or three essential quaHties of Moody's mind were 
 singularly persistent and ubiquitous, and like the few 
 geologic strata that may underlie the most varied 
 landscape, cropped out in his careless talk as unmis- 
 takably as in his poems or letters. His spiritual earn- 
 estness, for example, made him as indifferent to the 
 merely conventional aspects of life as he was passion- 
 ately curious about its essential structure. In his 
 poetry he avoided superficial detail, to penetrate at 
 once to essences. In his letters he often exasperatingly 
 withheld the petty facts of which most correspondence 
 consists, but was always frank and full in the reve- 
 lation of mood. Similarly in everyday intercourse he 
 combined intellectual candor and personal reserve in a 
 way that many found bewildering. For his friends the 
 paradox was symbolised in his eyes. In their liquidness 
 and transparence, in their steadfastness and quietude, 
 they seemed to open up quite fearlessly a way to his 
 deepest thoughts. Beautiful serene eyes they were, 
 telling all that mattered but ignoring the trivial and 
 the irrelevant: it was as if he had both the honesty 
 and the shyness of a child. This is perhaps what 
 his friend means when he speaks of his personality 
 "emerging from every folded sheet, with large veiled 
 eyes." 
 
 Akin to the serenity of his gaze, and like it a little 
 embarrassing on first acquaintance but endlessly re- 
 freshing to riper friendship, was his constitutional 
 taciturnity. It used to be said of him in college that 
 
 vi 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 ''It took Moody a pipeful to make a remark" — and 
 the discerning added that it was worth while to wait. 
 When I first met him, in the spring of 1894, during his 
 instructorship in the English Department at Harvard, 
 his manner was shy and somewhat self-consciously 
 awkward, so that we undergraduates of a complacent 
 local clique found it easy to dismiss him as "Western.'* 
 An odd blend of floridity and negligence about him 
 ofi^ended those whose ideal of manliness was a correct 
 dandyism. And in his physical being there was indeed 
 a sort of rough homeliness that made the epithet to a 
 certain extent descriptive. But it did not take long to 
 pass that stage, to find that he had also the freshness 
 and magnanimity of the West, and that he saw things 
 under wider horizons than those of the Cambridge 
 tea-tables. Above all, one discovered the richness of 
 his silences. He had a way of slightly knitting his 
 brows, as if taking, from under half-closed lids, a bird's- 
 eye view of the broadest possible stretch of his subject, 
 while he communed with his pipe, frequently pressing 
 down the tobacco with a forefinger long inured to that 
 service, and finally producing a brief comment, usually 
 metaphorical and often madly exaggerative, that lib- 
 erated the mind more than floods of ordinary talk. It 
 was as if, instead of dissipating the thought supply as 
 most talkers do, churning it up into a froth that gives 
 only an illusion of increased substance, he was engaged 
 in a quiet husbanding of truth, whereby it rose to 
 higher levels in the reservoir. He gave one always a 
 sense of increased insight, of renewed confidence, of 
 
 vii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 a deeper and truer conspectus of things than that of 
 everyday observation. 
 
 The liberating effect of his talk must have been due 
 in no small degree to its vividly figurative quality. No 
 matter to what extent one might have been led to 
 expect this by the luxuriance of figure characteristic of 
 his poetry, one could not but be struck afresh on each 
 occasion, by the surprising variety, the ingenious com- 
 plexity, and often the droll incongruity, of the meta- 
 phors that he would constantly strike out in the heat 
 of conversation, mould with loving care for a moment, 
 and then toss aside. The letters, too, it will be found, 
 owe much of their individuality of flavor to a use of 
 figure at once whimsical and persistently logical. Who 
 but Moody would have thought of comparing himself 
 to a bicycle in such elaborate detail as this : "Good fun, 
 but rather hard on one's tire. I hasten to assure you 
 that I am as yet unpunctured, though much worn at 
 the rim, and rapidly losing resiliency by leakage. I 
 relinquish the figure with reluctance." On another 
 occasion, trying to solace a friend incapacitated for 
 work, he lets himself be beguiled into some charming 
 variations on the old theme, "The dark cellar ripens 
 the wine." "And meanwhile," he says, "after one's 
 eyes get used to the dirty light, and one's feet to the 
 mildew, a cellar has its compensations. I have found 
 beetles of the most interesting proclivities, mice alto- 
 gether comradely and persuadable, and forgotten 
 potatoes that sprouted toward the crack of sunshine 
 with a wan maiden grace not seen above." But the 
 
 viii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 most irresistible instance, in all the letters, of this 
 peculiarly Moody-esque pursuit, with meticulous logic, 
 of a more or less absurd metaphor, occurs in a letter to 
 Mrs. Toy in which he hits off once for all that contrast 
 between East and West which was always haunting 
 him. " I am eager," he writes, "for the queer inimitable 
 charm of Cambridge, for that atmosphere of mind at 
 once so impersonal and so warm, for that neatness and 
 decency of you children, who have been washed and 
 dressed and sent to play on the front lawn of time by 
 old auntie Ding-an-sich, while we hoodlums contend 
 with the goat for tomato cans in the alley. I have a 
 fair line of the same to lay before your eyes when I 
 am admitted inside the aristocratic front gate: some 
 of them will make a fine effect in a ring around your 
 geranium bed." 
 
 Conceive this vigorous image-making faculty irre- 
 sponsibly applied to the thousand and one subjects of 
 casual talk; conceive it stimulated by the enthusiasm 
 of youthful comradeships, and invited by the endless 
 leisure of vagrant country walks in spring, or of long 
 winter evenings spent toasting before an open-grate 
 fire, in an atmosphere of tobacco smoke and hot rum 
 toddy; conceive it returning upon itself at will, and 
 constructing day by day a special cosmogony and 
 vocabulary of its own. One such winter evening I shall 
 never forget, when in the small hours the talk grew 
 youthfully philosophic, and Moody, his ever ruddy 
 face flushed with the excitement of improvisation, 
 leaning out from swirls of smoke and emphasizing his 
 
 ix 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 points with outstretched pipe, drew a picture of man 
 in the universe as a frog in a well, condemned always 
 to darkness, destined never to know what was in the 
 world above. I dare say it was only warmed-over 
 Kantianism ; certainly the toddy contributed much to 
 its impressiveness ; but when the rich cadences of his 
 voice died away it was to a solemn silence, with the 
 two youthful philosophers thoroughly awed at their 
 own imaginings. 
 
 Something of the same solemnity that invests that 
 image of the frog in the well hangs about certain other 
 conceptions that acquired for us, chiefly from Moody's 
 eloquence, a largely representative value. "It," for 
 example, referred to in the letters, transcends the ex- 
 planation it seems to require, because it both denotes 
 something so indefinable, and connotes something so 
 incommunicable. " It " is everything, taken together, 
 that may be the object of a youthful idealist's devotion ; 
 it is the sum total of all that is beautiful and worthy of 
 loyalty in the world ; it is what it is happiness to remem- 
 ber, wretchedness to forget. A "diastole," also men- 
 tioned in the letters, is a mood in which, so to speak, 
 the spiritual circulation is good (the figure is, of course, 
 drawn from the physiology of the heart) ; it is a mood of 
 vitality, of realization, of fulfilment. Such moods we 
 made it a point of honor, as well as a privilege, to cele- 
 brate by communication. Systoles we may also have 
 experienced, but usually we had the courage not to 
 talk about them. The most curious term of all, nam- 
 ing a type of humanity rather than a general idea, was 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 "Prltchard" — originally the name of a young work- 
 ing-man we met one evening during one of our long 
 aimless walks. In some occult way he typified for us 
 Philistinism — all the dull, prosaic world which was 
 our enemy. In some still more occult way (though 
 possibly cocktails had something to do with it) he 
 mystically blossomed into one of the elect. From that 
 time forth, "Pritchard" was for us the divinity in the 
 average man. 
 
 Crudely youthful as were some of these notions and 
 formulations, they played a genuine part in Moody's 
 development, and reverberations of them may be 
 caught by the attentive ear throughout his poems and 
 letters. They were at any rate generous, and sprang 
 from a fine idealistic enthusiasm. Moreover, they 
 illustrate, in their persistent tendency to take on figu- 
 rative form, what one comes finally to consider the 
 fundamental quality of his mind. Metaphor was his 
 natural mode of expression. It occurred to him as 
 spontaneously for a capricious snap-shot at everyday 
 life as for the more deliberate description in a letter or 
 for the noble setting-forth of his poetic dramas. Its 
 manifestations in casual talk had one element of charm 
 peculiarly their own. One does not get, alas, in the 
 poetry, or even in the letters, the comment of personal 
 gesture and inflection on these crowding figments of 
 his fancy: the gathering amusement in his eyes as he 
 elaborated some conceit; the portentous seriousness 
 with which he brought forth his exaggerations or absur- 
 dities; the final bursting shout of laughter, when the 
 
 xi 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 dam gave way, that shook his whole frame with its 
 physical gusto. 
 
 The distinctive trait of his mind was thus, I have 
 always thought, rather its imaginative power than its 
 purely Intellectual scope or subtlety: he was far more 
 poet than philosopher. There is in his books, to be 
 sure, even though it be obscured sometimes, especially 
 in the prose plays, by touches of sentimentalism, a 
 wisdom both noble and broad ; in daily intercourse one 
 loved the sweetness and sanity of his mind quite as 
 much as one admired its bold constructiveness ; and 
 his imagination itself, however untrammeled, owed 
 much of its vigor to a kind of tenacious consecutiveness 
 akin to logic. Nevertheless must one Insist that he 
 characteristically saw the world not from the detached 
 point of view of philosophy, and under its cold, even 
 illumination, but rather as a glowing focus where the 
 rays of passionate sympathetic interest for the moment 
 converged, brilliantly relieved against semi-obscurity. 
 He leaned always toward the extremes of statement in 
 which such a vision, with its sharp chiaroscuro, natu- 
 rally expresses itself. He was too eager in the vivid 
 presentment of what he had felt intensely to linger 
 over peddling accuracies of qualification. He seized 
 upon his subject, isolated and magnified it. Many 
 amusing instances of his exaggeration may be found 
 in the letters. "There are three hundred and twenty- 
 three hand-organs and ninety-seven pianos on our 
 block," he writes from his New York lodgings in 
 1900, "and every hour thirty-five thousand drays 
 
 xii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 loaded with sheet-iron pass the house. Irving Place, 
 you know, is a quiet old-fashioned neighborhood, so we 
 are justly proud of these slight evidences of anima- 
 tion." From Chicago he sends the plaint, during one 
 of his periods of teaching: "I counted my vocabulary 
 last night, and discovered it to consist of ninety-three 
 words. You shall have them all, if you will promise 
 not to be reckless with them." Such passages as these 
 help us to understand the over-luxuriance of his 
 youthful poetic style. If we consider, furthermore, 
 that his native tendency to extravagance was fostered, 
 almost from the first, by an acquired rhetorical virtu- 
 osity the exercise of which must have been highly ex- 
 citing, we shall be able to account for the turgidity of 
 much of his early verse. 
 
 But if both temperament and technical skill thus 
 inclined him rather toward romantic luxuriance than 
 toward classic chastity, only the more remarkable 
 becomes the tireless discipline by which he trained 
 himself to achieve the sobriety and distinction of such 
 later pieces as, say, the lyrics in "The Fire-Bringer." 
 We are reminded of Verdi's progress from "II Trova- 
 tore" to "Otello," or Wagner's from " Rienzi" to " Die 
 Meistersinger," by a poet who begins with rococo effects 
 
 like 
 
 " Yet her shy devious lambent soul 
 With my slow soul should walk," ^ 
 
 and ends with such noble simplicities as 
 
 1 See first draft of "Wilding Flower," page 58. 
 xiii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 "Of wounds and sore defeat 
 I made my battle stay; 
 Winged sandals for my feet 
 I wove of my delay; 
 Of weariness and fear 
 I made my shouting spear; 
 Of loss, and doubt, and dread, 
 And swift oncoming doom, 
 I made a helmet for my head 
 And a floating plume." ^ 
 
 No one not endowed by nature with a vivid imagin- 
 ation and an eagerly sympathetic spirit could have 
 written lines like these; but furthermore, no one thus 
 endowed could have written them, had he not long 
 schooled himself in the subtle arts of moderation, just 
 emphasis, and suggestion. I hardly know which the 
 more to admire in Moody as a poet, the native rich- 
 ness of his mind, or the patient art by which he learned 
 to draw from it so pure a harmony. 
 
 The reader may perhaps welcome, for the Insight 
 they give into both qualities, a few more examples of 
 his early work than he decided to include in the 
 "Poems" of 1 90 1. What he rejected then, as not 
 representative of his artistry at its best, we may now 
 find well worth study, as revealing something of the 
 processes by which it was attained, especially when we 
 can examine the piece in the light of his own comment, 
 as in the case of "Wilding Flower." "Heart's Wild- 
 Flower," as he renamed the revised form of it printed 
 ^ "The Fire- B ringer," Act I. 
 
 xiv 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 in the "Poems," is one of his loveliest lyrics. It suc- 
 ceeds in saying what he considered to be "a thing which 
 constitutes much of the poetry of a young man's hfe," 
 and in saying it not more eloquently than simply, with 
 much of exquisite music, and no jarring notes. With 
 this version well in mind, turn to the first draft, sent 
 with the letter of May i6, 1896,^ and examine it in 
 some detail. First of all may be noted so apparently 
 trivial a matter as the way of printing the stanza : six 
 short verses in the earlier form, three long ones in the 
 later. The short verses break the free sweep of the 
 rhythm. In many places the difference may be negli- 
 gible, but at the end of the next to the last stanza, for 
 example, the wondrous charm of the rhythm is much 
 enhanced by printing all in one line 
 
 "Awes, adorations, songs of ruth, hesitancies, and tears." 
 
 Secondly, the author has ruthlessly deleted stanzas 
 li-viii of the original version — more than half of the 
 entire poem. So heroic an amputation was necessitated 
 chiefly by the obscurity of the suspended construction 
 in stanzas iv-vi, which he admitted only after consid- 
 erable argument, and reluctantly, as will be seen from 
 the letter of June 23. Indeed, as in most revisions, 
 there was here a loss as well as a gain ; for he was quite 
 right in pointing out the effect of " breathlessness and 
 holding aloof" secured by the suspension, and in com- 
 paring its constructive value to that of an organ point 
 in music. The omission of stanza iii also sacrifices the 
 » Page 56. 
 XV 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 delicate preparation it made for the final stanza. But 
 sacrifices are not sacrifices unless they cost something, 
 and skillful revision consists precisely in this wise 
 balancing of complex accounts. It was worth while at 
 almost any price to get rid of the "flushed adventur- 
 ous violins," "the tower noon-precipiced," and the 
 "aching oboe throat that twins Night's moonward 
 melodist," which are the youthful Moody at his 
 worst. 
 
 In the third place, the substitutions made in the 
 retained stanzas are all noteworthy, most of them 
 because they tend toward simplicity. Such, for in- 
 stance, are "spirit fire" for "lilac fire," "crown of 
 tears and flame" for "carcanet of flame," "autumn 
 woe" for "subtle woe," "a little gift" for "a mystic 
 gift," and the poignant "shy, shy wilding flowers" for 
 the rather literary "lovesome wilding flowers." Most 
 interesting of all, however, are the alterations in the 
 third stanza of the present version, as not merely 
 verbal but affecting the conception itself, toning it 
 down from the extreme and acrid terms into which 
 Moody's instinct for potent expression had led him, 
 into much juster, tenderer ones. 
 
 " Not such a sign as women wear 
 Who bow beneath the shame 
 Of marriage insolence, and bear 
 A housewife's faded name" — 
 
 which exaggerates the contrast and repels us by its 
 harshness, becomes — 
 
 xvi 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 "Not such a sign as women wear who make their foreheads 
 
 tame 
 With life's long tolerance, and bear love's sweetest, humblest 
 name." 
 
 Here the rhetorical antithesis remains unimpaired, 
 and there is a marked gain in spiritual propriety, and 
 consequently in artistic dignity. 
 
 Finally it is well to note, after we have made all 
 possible criticism of this first draft on the scores of 
 obscurity of construction, turgidity of thought, or 
 intemperance of language, that these are after all the 
 faults of excess rather than of defect, and that in spite 
 of them, and in some degree even because of them, the 
 mind at work here shows itself to be thoroughly alive. 
 If it has the crudity, it has also the teeming vitality of 
 youth. Its exuberance is infinitely to be preferred to the 
 pallid correctness of academicism. Its mistakes are 
 those of a generous, independent nature daring enough 
 to attempt something new, and its failures are of the 
 inspiring kind that in all artistic paths pave the way to 
 future successes. One is glad to think that even in his 
 moments of discouragement he had the pioneer's sus- 
 taining sense of adventure and discovery, as when he 
 writes: " I think — pardon the egotism of the utterance 
 (you would if you knew what tears of failure have gone 
 to water the obstreperous little plant) — I think you 
 are not tolerant enough of the instinct for conquest in 
 language, the attempt to push out its boundaries, to 
 win for it continually some new swiftness, some rare 
 compression, to distil from it a more opaline drop. 
 
 xvii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Is n't it possible, too, to be pedantic in the demand for 
 simplicity? It's a cry which, if I notice aright, nature 
 has a jaunty way of disregarding. Command a rose- 
 bush in the stress of June to purge itself; coerce a con- 
 volvulus out of the paths of catachresis. Amen!" 
 
 In this endeavor, thus early put before himself as a 
 conscious ideal, to win for language "some new swift- 
 ness, some rare compression," Moody found, as time 
 went on, not only an unfailing interest, but an object 
 worthy his most tireless devotion, his most unswerving 
 loyalty : he had the passion of the old alchemists for the 
 distillation of that ''more opaline drop." Impatient as 
 he might be of the drudgery of teaching or hack- 
 writing, in his poetic work no labor could dismay him. 
 He loved to take pains. I especially remember the trick 
 he had, in his rough drafts, of making endless substitu- 
 tions of words, choosing first one and then another, 
 striking out each in turn and surmounting it with the 
 next, until some of his lines looked like the pediments 
 of ruined temples, with columns of words rising at 
 irregular intervals to unequal heights. To find him in 
 his studio on a working morning (if one had the temer- 
 ity), in a cloud of tobacco smoke, threading a labyrinth 
 of emendations, surrounded by the carnage of previous 
 encounters — burnt matches, scattered ashes, and 
 discarded sheets — was to conceive a new respect for 
 an art which could so completely conceal itself. His 
 production was necessarily slow. The "Masque of 
 Judgment," for example, was begun in the summer of 
 1897, written out in fragmentary shape a year later 
 
 xviii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 during the holiday in Italy, and elaborated in London 
 in the spring of 1899 to twice its previous proportions. 
 ** There are," he mentions in December of that year, 
 "counting rewriting and further development here 
 and there, about five hundred lines to be added." It 
 was finally completed in Boston early in 1900. "The 
 Faith-Healer," which was not finished until the last 
 year of his life, 19 10, was begun, as the letters show, 
 fifteen years before, in December, 1895. 
 
 Some sense of the devotion and the deliberateness 
 with which he wrote his poetry is necessary to an 
 understanding of his loathing for what he calls in one 
 of his early Chicago letters "the crowd of spiteful 
 assiduous nothings that keep me from It." Although 
 he recognized with his usual fair-mindedness that he 
 must pay his way by teaching or some similar form of 
 "useful" work, and punctilious as he was in the dis- 
 charge of these duties, he could not but resent their 
 intrusion on time that he needed for work of infinitely 
 greater intrinsic value. And they not only absorbed 
 his time — they dulled his mental edge, and when 
 long continued robbed him of "the spirit of selec- 
 tion, the zest of appropriation" which is the life of 
 an artist. Consequently no note is more recurrent 
 in the first letters from Chicago than that of a discon- 
 tent with his new surroundings which was doubtless 
 only partly due to the specific quality of the place, and 
 is chiefly to be attributed to the distastefulness of his 
 pursuits there. 
 
 Indeed the comments on Chicago, though all inter- 
 
 xix 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 esting, are oddly contradictory, and suggest a ceaseless 
 alternation of moods. The mere physical spaciousness 
 of the Western landscape seems sometimes to have 
 oppressed, sometimes to have excited him. "Cam- 
 bridge, mellow and autumnal," he writes soon after 
 his arrival, "begins already to loom symbolic, under 
 the stress of this relentless prairie light and vast fea- 
 tureless horizon." Yet, a month later, "To be a poet," 
 he cries, "is a much better thing than to write poetry 
 — out here, at least, watched by these wide horizons, 
 beckoned to by these swift streamers of victorious sun- 
 set." Both of these opposed moods are not only ex- 
 pressed but philosophically penetrated in the beautiful 
 letter of February i6, 1896, about the Irish girl he met 
 skating. 
 
 What he called the "Western heartiness and 
 uniplexity" subjected him to similar fluctuations of 
 feeling. "As for Chicago," he tells Mrs. Toy, "I find 
 that it gives me days or at least hours of broad-gauge 
 Whitmanesque enthusiasm, meagrely sprinkled over 
 weeks of tedium." In the long run he seems to have 
 felt the deprivations more than the advantages: "In 
 the East . . . one had n't to go far before finding 
 some refinement of feeling, some delicate arabesque of 
 convention, to help make up for the lack of liberty. 
 Out here there is even less liberty (because less thought) 
 and there is nothing — or next to nothing — to com- 
 pensate." He describes in a memorable sentence of the 
 same letter the deadly effect of such monotony on his 
 eagerly adventurous mind — " that awful hush settling 
 
 XX 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 down on everything, as if To Udv had suddenly dis- 
 covered himself to be stuffed with sawdust." 
 
 The truth is, Moody was not made to wear content- 
 edly, anywhere, the academic harness and blinders: 
 he was too full of the untamable wildness of the crea- 
 tive mind which he has expressed so incomparably in 
 his "Road-Hymn for the Start." 
 
 " Dear shall be the banquet table where their singing spir- 
 its press; 
 Dearer be our sacred hunger, and our pilgrim loneliness." 
 
 No one so insatiably curious about life as he was, so 
 ardent to learn, could give himself with patience to 
 teaching. How many times must he have felt that im- 
 pulse he confesses to "trundle his Httle instructorial 
 droning-gear into Lake Michigan, and step out west or 
 south on the Open Road, a free man by the grace of 
 God, and a tramp by Rachel's intercession"! How 
 dead and buried must he have seemed to himself when 
 he computed in January, 1898, "April is only eighty- 
 eight lectures, forty committee meetings, and several 
 thousand themes away"! And how archly, a little 
 later, as the months nevertheless elapse, does he para- 
 phrase Wordsworth: "My heart leaps up when I be- 
 hold a calendar on the sly " ! When the vacations do at 
 last arrive, and he is free once more to take up his own 
 work, it is exciting to read of his joy. " I can feel the 
 holy influences that wait on him who loafs beginning 
 to purge me and urge me, though I tremble to say so 
 for fear of frightening back their shy inquiring tenta- 
 
 xxi 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 cles." "The summer I am bound to have though the 
 Heavens fall, or rather because they are not going to 
 fall but remain as a fittingly modest framework for the 
 spectacle of my felicity." 
 
 It is worth while to insist with some amplitude of 
 detail on the disharmony between Moody's economic 
 conditions and his spiritual needs, both because his 
 resolution of the discord was accomplished with a tact 
 and courage that reveal much of what is finest in his 
 character, and more generally because this ApoUo- 
 Admetus problem is fundamental in the life of every 
 artist, and Moody's example is therefore a widely 
 inspiring one. His friends could never sufficiently 
 admire the quiet self-respect with which he pursued a 
 course midway between the extremes where so many 
 gifted natures meet shipwreck. In the first place, he 
 was both too honest and too shrewd to shirk his service 
 to Admetus — that irreducible minimum of it which 
 he had decided to be necessary. He could even, 
 thanks to his imagination, take the point of view of the 
 task-master, see what was reasonably to be expected 
 of the servant, and understand the fatuity of evading 
 it. He always fulfilled his obligations to the letter. 
 When he was working on his "History of English 
 Literature," for instance, at Gloucester, in May, 1900, 
 — a month when moors and sea are at their most 
 seductive, — he may have found it necessary, as he 
 whimsically states, to "put on blinders, stuff his ears 
 with wax, and strap himself to the desk"; but at 
 least the work done in that constricted position was 
 
 xxii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 solid and workmanlike, as any one may see for him- 
 self. 
 
 On the other hand, he never forgot for a moment 
 that such work was but a means to an end ; he never 
 tolerated the sentimental fallacy that faithfulness in 
 the treadmill exempts one from the higher responsi- 
 bilities of a liberal leisure ; he never gave Admetus one 
 jot more than was nominated in the bond. Thus he 
 refused the offer, from Chicago University, of the full 
 salary of a professor for lectures during one quarter 
 each year: a single quarter was too much. Of course 
 the price of such devotion was poverty. His method 
 was to labor at teaching or hack-writing until he had 
 accumulated a little money, and then to live on it as 
 simply as possible as long as it lasted, too happy in 
 composition to mind small discomforts. That it lasted 
 longer in Europe than at home was one reason of 
 his frequent voyages. Fortunately he did not need a 
 large income. Aside from a barbaric fondness for 
 jewelry and fancy waistcoats his personal tastes were 
 inexpensive; though fond of the society of cultivated 
 people, he had not the least trace of snobbery; almost 
 his only financial luxury was the help he often extended 
 to relatives and friends less prosperous than himself. 
 Even with these advantages, however, he showed, it 
 seems to me, a clear-headedness in the discrimina- 
 tion between immediate and ultimate values, and a 
 stanch courage in the refusal to let the nearer interfere 
 with the greater, as difficult to attain, and as rare, as 
 they are admirable and worthy of emulation. 
 
 xxiii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 The entire freedom of his work from the influences 
 of commercialism, even in its most insidious and seduc- 
 tive forms, is due, I am sure, to this faculty he had of 
 keeping money-earning and art as completely sepa- 
 rated in his mind as they are in reality. It was placed 
 in such striking relief by the circumstances, unprece- 
 dented in his hitherto obscure life, surrounding the 
 production of ''The Great Divide" in the autumn of 
 1906 (the single decisive worldly success of his short 
 career) that I remember vividly what he told me of his 
 affairs during a brief visit in the country soon after 
 the opening night. He was then earning about five 
 hundred dollars a week from the play, and was 
 besieged by reporters, publishers, managers, and gen- 
 eral social invitations. He was also quite unspoiled 
 by it all, as simple in manner and cordial in talk as 
 ever, and more enthusiastic over the beauties of the 
 country than over the glories of Broadway. In the 
 course of a long morning walk he told me that he 
 hoped sometime to be able to buy a farm, where he 
 could write undisturbed, and that now for the first 
 time, among those New England hills, he realized how 
 he had been tempted by large offers, received from 
 four different publishers, for "The Great Divide" in 
 novel form. Such sums had been mentioned as twenty- 
 five, and even fifty, thousand dollars. But it had always 
 seemed to him, he said, that the turning of a play into a 
 novel, or vice versa, was a confounding of two essentially 
 diverse types of art, and therefore a violation of a ba- 
 sic artistic principle ; and he had refused all the offers. 
 
 xxiv 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Not that there was anything of the prig in him — 
 his sympathies were far too broad for that. The notes 
 in which he discusses with Mr. Gilder the suppression 
 of his initials on the poem written in his honor reveal a 
 characteristic mingling of modesty as to his own attain- 
 ments with delight in the appreciation of others and 
 tender concern for their feelings. He had, too, that 
 rarest form of humor which enables a man to laugh 
 at himself, and an artist to relish parodies of his own 
 style. We see it in the letter of January 24, 1901, 
 to Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson, in which he plays 
 with the notion of how his "florid vocabulary" may 
 affect a brother poet of the opposed method, a devotee 
 of under-statement. Even in college days, when some 
 solemnity of egotism is almost the accepted attitude, 
 he had already this self-immolating humor. A college 
 mate, I remember, used to make fun of the "foolish 
 little cricket thing" in the song, "My love is gone into 
 the East,"^ and to turn the third stanza into baldest 
 prose by the simple device of changing "or late or 
 soon" into "sooner or later." That Moody may have 
 been a little nettled as well as amused is suggested by 
 his request, when he sent me " Dawn Parley" a year or 
 two later, that before reading it I abstract myself for 
 twelve hours from the society of the jester; but all the 
 same he thoroughly enjoyed the joke, and recurs to it 
 with unction in his letter of December i, 1895. When 
 he was writing "Gloucester Moors," at East Glouces- 
 ter, in the spring of 1900, he asked a lady at the hotel, 
 
 * "Poems and Plays," vol. I, p. 151. 
 
 XXV 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 learned in wild-flowers, to tell him the names of all she 
 knew, and used some of them in the second stanza — 
 
 "Jill o'er the ground is purple blue, 
 Blue is the quaker-maid." 
 
 One item in the catalogue, baby blue-eye, brought 
 from him a shout of laughter, and the suggestion that 
 it ought to be incorporated in the line 
 
 ** Baby blue is the baby blue-eye." 
 
 In the long run, and after all analysis, it is Moody's 
 broad humanity that stands out as the most lovable 
 trait of the man and the imperishable quality in the 
 poet. He accepted human nature, and glorified it. He 
 pitied its fallibility and admired its aspiration ; and he 
 identified himself with it, frankly recognizing in his 
 own character the two conflicting elements. From one 
 of his most serious letters, to a friend who does not 
 wish it to be published entire, the following passage 
 may be taken as a touching illustration : — 
 
 "Thanks for your word of cheer. It found me in a 
 state of dejection compounded of grippe and unfaith- 
 fulness, and lifted me to the heights again — the only 
 climate that suits my lungs these days, though the 
 valleys with their lights and business are tempting 
 when night sets in, and too often betray me downward. 
 ... I needed the good word you sent me more than a 
 little, and am in your debt a trifle deeper than before — 
 if a matter of a few thousands is worth counting in 
 my hopeless insolvency. If my work, stumbling and 
 
 xxvi 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 delaj^ed as it usually seems to me, gives you any help 
 in the contemplation, consider what the candour and 
 spiritual grace of your character have been and are to 
 me, looking with eyes no less wistful after righteous- 
 ness for being somewhat bleared and dazzled by sen- 
 suous strayings. These things are perhaps best left 
 unsaid, but now and then one forgets that he is an 
 Anglo-Saxon and remembers only that he is a man, 
 with a man's eternal aims, and a man's chances of 
 help and hindrance on the tragic road ; for which former 
 it is not unbecoming from time to time to give thanks 
 somewhat soberly." 
 
 Such a passage as this evokes for us afresh, and with 
 an even more intimate sense of personal presence, the 
 generous nature that has expressed this religion of 
 humanity with incomparable power in Raphael's 
 hymn to man in Act in of the " Masque of Judgment." 
 Deeply spiritual, and as far as possible removed from 
 the sensualism the thoughtless have found in it, is his 
 paganism, as there set forth, his belief in the feelings, 
 the passions, and the senses. He conceives them all 
 as ministers of spirituality, and sees them transfigured 
 in that ministration. He believes that through them 
 alone is spirituality realized, or realizable. 
 
 "Not in vain, not in vain," 
 sings Raphael, — 
 
 "The spirit hath its sanguine stain, 
 And from its senses five doth peer 
 As a fawn from the green windows of a wood." 
 
 xxvii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 To his mind the only possible attitude was a hearty- 
 acceptance of life as a whole. He was an enemy of 
 nothing that is positive, but only of the negative 
 things: doubt, cowardice, indifference, all ascetic 
 denials of life. The reader of the letters that follow 
 will, it is hoped, come ever more clearly to recognize the 
 warm-hearted, welcoming personality that speaks in 
 them. He was one of the few who can use, in their 
 fullest sense, the words he has put into the mouth of 
 Raphael : — 
 
 " O struggler in the mesh 
 Of spirit and of flesh 
 Some subtle hand hath tied to make thee Man, 
 
 My bosom yearns above thee at the end, 
 Thinking of all thy gladness, all thy woe; 
 
 Whoever is thy foe, 
 I am thy friend, thy friend." 
 
 D. G. M. 
 
 New York, April, 1913. 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 Ig^iUtam laauQl^n jEooDt 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 l^tlUam Vm^n iEooti? 
 
 In spite of his habitual extreme reticence about 
 personal and family affairs, Moody once confided to 
 me that when, in the fall of 1889, he entered Harvard 
 College, his entire capital consisted of twenty-five 
 dollars.^ He was also partly responsible for the support 
 of one of his sisters, I believe ; though his statements 
 were always so vague on these points that even after 
 knowing him years one was never surprised at the 
 sudden cropping up in his conversation of a hitherto 
 uncatalogued relative. Certain it is that he worked 
 hard at typewriting, tutoring, proctoring, — anything 
 he could find to do, meanwhile studying to such good 
 purpose that at the end of the third year he had enough 
 points for graduation. He accordingly spent his senior 
 year abroad, tutoring a boy in order to earn his way. 
 It was at this time that he made the first of his many 
 visits to Greece. The winter he spent chiefly in Flor- 
 ence. 
 
 During his undergraduate years at Cambridge he had 
 contributed some verse to the Harvard Monthly, and 
 
 1 William Vaughn Moody was born July 8, 1869, at Spencer, 
 Indiana. 
 
 3 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 he continued these contributions during his travels 
 and after his return to Cambridge as a graduate stu- 
 dent and instructor. Other Harvard Monthly poets of 
 his day were Philip Henry Savage, also of the class 
 of 1893, Hugh McCulloch (1892), and, a little earlier, 
 Dr. George Santayana (1886). In the later class of 
 1895 was graduated his friend Joseph Trumbull Stick- 
 ney,of whose posthumous book of poems he was one of 
 the editors. 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 [Sept. 5, 1892.] 
 Warwick. [England.] 
 Dear Robert: 
 
 We arrived here yesterday (Sept. 4) after a 
 charming two weeks in the Scotch and English 
 lakes, and expect to remain for ten days or so. 
 I hope that you and Dow can get in your English 
 trip before we leave Warwickshire, so that I can 
 give you the benefit of my accumulated experience 
 in dealing with the Insolent Briton and in viewing 
 the historic monuments of his insolence. These 
 midland counties are excellently beautiful, to use 
 Mr. Howells's solemn phrase, and beautiful in a 
 fresh wide-awake way which will appeal to you 
 doubly after the sultry splendor of Italy. . . . 
 
 Will M . 
 
 ^4 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 [Paris, October, 1892.] 
 Dear Robert: 
 
 Will you add another star to the crown the 
 Lord keeps for those who waver not in friendship, 
 by receiving the package of books which I send 
 by this mail, paying the custom-house charges (if 
 there are any) and forwarding the package to the 
 address below? . . . 
 
 I hope to receive the Monthly regularly. Am 
 sorry not to send anything for the October num- 
 ber. I have turned Pegasus out to pasture and he 
 eateth much green grass, but inclineth not to 
 soar. . . . 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 [Paris, Nov. 22, 1892.] 
 Dear Robert: 
 
 Please receive my heartfelt thanks for the tele- 
 gram, the book-forwarding, the rank list and the 
 assessment notice. . . . After all sorts of persua- 
 sion, physical and moral, the rank list refuses to 
 disgorge more than five A's for me, which leaves 
 me with only thirteen and a half toward a summa. 
 I fear even your professional aplomb will be 
 staggered by the hopelessness of the situation. 
 
 5 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 So far I have had little time and no inclina- 
 tion for study, but under the sedative influence 
 of German beer and German beauties I hope to 
 get my pulses down to a pace where grinding will 
 be a delirious adventure. We have been in Paris 
 now seven weeks and I have learned this dainty 
 Sodom tolerably well, I flatter myself. I dare say 
 your fingers are reaching instinctively after your 
 blue pencil, to put the mark of eternal damnation 
 on my adjective. But I insist on dainty. After 
 three or four nights spent with "les gens qui 
 s'amusent" in some of the places where a fortu- 
 nate acquaintance with a French officer gave me 
 entrance, I am sure that never in the history of 
 man was the scarlet robe so delicately woven or of 
 so gossamer a texture. I send a piece of verse — 
 for which, I fear, your blue pencil will have the 
 same horrible affinity. Read it yourself first and 
 let not mercy season justice. If it is printed I 
 should like to have a proof if possible. . . . 
 
 Will. 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 [Dresden: April ii, 1893.] 
 Dear Robert: 
 
 I was overjoyed to find a letter from you wait- 
 ing for me in Dresden, doubly so as I had had no 
 
 6 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 mail since leaving Italy, six weeks before. We 
 were unfortunately prevented from accepting the 
 Grand Llama's invitation, but made up for it in 
 part by hobnobbing with the Sultan in Constanti- 
 nople, the quality of whose wine and rose-leaf 
 jelly is absolutely beyond criticism. We had the 
 good luck to strike some of the Lord's people on 
 leaving Italy, Mr. Edward Lowell and family, 
 and spent three weeks with them in Greece — 
 three weeks of flawless enjoyment for me, in spite 
 of the resin in the wine and the ubiquitous prowl- 
 ing of the Philistine. After doing what could 
 be easily done from Athens, — Eleusis, Phylae, 
 Aegina, and Marathon, — we went down to 
 Nauplia in the Peloponnesus, and made flying 
 trips to Epidaurus, Argos and Mycenae. Instead 
 of coming into Germany by way of Triest we 
 chose the Aegean route, and spent a week in 
 Constantinople, studying the mind and manners 
 of ye sad-eyed Mussulman. So that my time has 
 been pretty well taken up for a long time, and 
 your rebuke on the subject of letterwriting is only 
 half merited, or at least so I try to believe for 
 ease of conscience sake. Two belated and badly- 
 battered Monthlies have reached me — the Octo- 
 ber and January numbers, I think, but aside from 
 
 7 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 this and a newspaper clipping now and then, 
 Harvard and her doings have been pure conjec- 
 ture for me. I am sorry not to have been able to 
 send anything for padding, but I have had neither 
 time nor inclination to write. The outline of 
 Italian II came to hand all right and I am 
 infinitely obliged. I have put all my spare time on 
 Dante so far, and probably shall not try now to 
 work up Sheldon's course — I have not the nerve 
 to throw such sand in the maw of the faculty 
 Cerberus, lest he should turn and rend me. These 
 days I suck much milk from the paps of the 
 Wagnerian muse, so far without any symptoms of 
 spiritual colic — Walkiire and Tannhauser last 
 week, with a prospect of the whole Rheingold 
 cycle next. Your flashlight description of the 
 meeting of the church in Laodicea was most 
 picturesque and made me horribly homesick for 
 such communion — whether God is blackballed 
 or not I am a candidate for the first vacant posi- 
 tion as usher or organ-boy. Also the Italian 
 restaurant k la Luino wrung my bowels with 
 envious longings of a curious gastro-psychic 
 complexity. We sail from Genoa May 24, and 
 shall be in Boston by the 5th or 6th of June, so that 
 I can attend to everything but the gown, which I 
 
 8 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 would be glad if you would order for me according 
 to the enclosed measurements. I have applied for 
 a fellowship for next year, and if I get it shall 
 come back for an indefinite period. I hope you 
 will be a doorkeeper still, even if Providence 
 has n't the good taste to make you a burner 
 of myrrh before the inmost altars. ... I have 
 about decided not to spread on Class-day, as it is 
 a huge bother and being away all year has kept 
 me clear of social debts. Do you think it advisable 
 to spread under the circumstances? ... As ever, 
 
 Will. 
 
 Of Moody's undergraduate verse there is little if any 
 that he, as an artist, would care to have preserved. His 
 Class Day Poem, however, called "The Song of the 
 Elder Brothers," has an autobiographical interest that 
 justifies the quotation of a few stanzas here. All 
 through his life the contrast between the fresh vitality 
 of the west and the mellower civilization of the east 
 exercised his imagination ; as a man he felt it strongly 
 in coming from his Indiana village to Harvard, and 
 later to Florence and Greece; as an artist he tried at 
 various times to picture it, notably in "The Great 
 Divide." The class day poem shows that in his under- 
 graduate years he was already keenly aware of the 
 quality of Harvard, and what is more, conscious of his 
 personal debt to its traditions. 
 
 9 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 The nucleus of the poem is the song in praise and 
 thanksgiving to Alma Mater which the poet attributes 
 to his spiritual "elder brothers," to all those who 
 before him 
 
 "Saw the looming of the gates 
 That open unto larger seas, 
 Who heard the singing of the breeze 
 That calls to sweeter, lonelier fates. 
 
 Longfellow, with the blossomed hair 
 And low-tuned lyre, who sings alway; 
 ' Behind the cloud is golden day, 
 So let us fare as children fare.' 
 
 And Emerson, who stops and hears 
 The pine trees' ancient overtones, 
 Who listens at the hearts of stones, 
 And weighs the star-dust and the years. 
 
 And all the other men who brought 
 Some message from beyond the bar 
 Of sense, where ever chime and jar 
 The opalescent seas of thought." 
 
 After describing the song of these elder brothers, 
 and asking what answer we who "kneel now before the 
 mother's face" shall send, he continues: — 
 
 "Shall we not say: 'While sunset flings 
 Through our great hall its jewelled rain, 
 
 10 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 From windows blazoned with their train 
 Of poets, saints, and soldier kings. 
 
 So long shall this our college throw 
 Across the loud noon, bare and bright, 
 A jewelled and a sunset light, 
 A many-ribboned golden glow. 
 
 While Charles's chivalry doth shine 
 Upon the pane, her halls shall hold 
 Such hearts as gave up land and gold 
 And went to die in Palestine. 
 
 So long as Homer clasps his lyre 
 Among us some shall still be found. 
 About whose brows the gods have wound 
 Song's amaranthine buds of fire. 
 
 While Shakespeare waits and seems to scan 
 Each form that passes in the dusk. 
 One here shall break away the husk 
 Which hides the fruit-sweet heart of man.' 
 
 So shall we answer, kneeling low, 
 Feeling the time draw very near 
 To part, and common things grow dear, 
 And things forgotten clearer grow. 
 
 Long, mellow twilights in the Yard, 
 The peace that settles from the trees, 
 The tinkle of guitars, the leas 
 Of laughter dripping sweet as nard ; 
 
 II 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 The lazy Charles at noon; the long 
 Salt meadows; the slow beat of oars; 
 Faint cheery calls; across the moors 
 The great tower rising like a song; 
 
 Till we can only bow the head, 
 Waiting the Mother's gracious ken, 
 And reach across the years to when 
 We, too, may say as those have said: 
 
 * Fair Harvard ! Mother fair and grand ! 
 Behold, we are thy children too; 
 Great mother from whose breast we drew 
 The larger strength of brain and hand 1 
 
 Lo, have we borne a knightly sword? 
 
 Thy kiss was misty on the blade ! 
 
 Lo, men's hearts have we stirred and swayed? 
 
 Thou puttest in our mouth the word!'" 
 
 The year after his graduation Moody spent in study 
 at Cambridge, eking out a slender income by the 
 editorial labors on Bulfinch's Mythology with Mr. 
 Lovett to which the letters refer, and in other ways. 
 Then came a year as instructor in English composition 
 under his friend Professor Lewis E. Gates, and in the 
 spring of 1895 the summons to Chicago University 
 which took him thither in the following fall. 
 
 During his two graduate years at Harvard he wrote 
 a good many poems, but they were for the most part 
 immature and more or less imitative of Keats, Ros- 
 setti, Walt Whitman, and especially Browning. Al- 
 
 12 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 though he profited much from the writing of them, 
 especially in his rhythms, eventually so marvellous in 
 their subtlety and variety, he considered most of 
 them only studies, as is shown by his omitting them 
 from the ** Poems " of 190 1. 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 Dear Robert: 
 
 As you purpose returning so soon, I think I will 
 not come to Waterville, as the present stringency 
 in the money market has at last crippled even my 
 immense resources. Do not hurry back on Bul- 
 finch's account, however; I will have a general 
 supervision over Zeus's amours, and will keep 
 Here out of his hair until such time as the color 
 fadeth out of the Waterville sky and the dregs 
 in the wine cup grow bitter. Till then, farewell. 
 
 Will M . . 
 
 Cambridge, 
 Aug. 10, 1893. 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 Dear Rob: 
 
 What became of the Seal Harbor Coeducational 
 Trust? I have heard nothing of it and am con- 
 sumed with curiosity. My two weeks' taste of the 
 
 13 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 World's Fake has left upon my lips the salt of 
 vanities. I long even for a swallow of Laodicean 
 shaving water to cool my tongue. Hoping to in- 
 dulge with you in that mild beverage before long, 
 
 As ever, Will. 
 
 Cambridge, 
 September 17, 1893. 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 23 Hilton. 
 [Cambridge, Feb. 5, 1894.] 
 Dear Rob: 
 
 The midyears [examinations] have left me limp 
 as a rag, and have convinced me that, instead of 
 an amiable divorce such as you suggest, Philology 
 and Minerva are destined to part with mutual 
 scorn and vituperation, if indeed their feud does 
 not result in pistols and pillow-chokings. If you 
 want to rescue either of them you must come on 
 in March as you promise, for I will not answer 
 for their lives a day later than the twentieth. 
 Joking aside, though, we all expect you then, and 
 are already beginning to plan revels, masques, 
 and pageants of royal magnificence to fleet the 
 time withal. 
 
 14 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 Stone and Kimball ... are getting out vol- 
 umes of verse for Mac and Santy [Hugh McCul- 
 loch and George Santayana] and have even 
 approached me with harp and psaltery, though so 
 far I have had grace from God to resist their 
 blandishments. Cambridge is rather good fun 
 this winter. The Browning Club, I hear, still 
 leads a subterranean existence somewhere, but its 
 place in the upper world has been taken by the 
 ''Folk-lore Society," an organization much af- 
 fected by voluptuous young ladies yearning to 
 walk in the cold clear light of science. They are 
 all saturated with sun-myths, and ghosts, trolls, 
 and witches are their daily walk and conversation. 
 My frightened attempts to be statistical have 
 been frowned upon, and I fear I shall not be a 
 success. Mrs. Toy still takes pity on my orphan 
 state, and asks me to see interesting people at her 
 house. Last Friday I bearded a whole den of lions 
 at Mrs. Moulton's — from old Dr. Holmes to 
 Robert Grant and old Trowbridge — to say 
 nothing of an Oxford prof who has dined with 
 Dodo at the Master of Balliol's. Do you have any 
 time for writing? Do not bury your talent in a 
 napkin — even if the napkin stands for domestic 
 bliss and the ground for the goodliness of this 
 
 15 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 world. Do make your plans to come on during the 
 spring vacation: we refuse to be refused. . . . 
 
 Will. 
 Feb. 5, 1894. 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 23 Hilton's Block. 
 Cambridge. 
 
 I don't know whether you know that I have 
 decided to shuffle about next year in your old 
 shoes — with Gates in English 22. I should hesi- 
 tate to accept it did I not have such splendid 
 examples before my eyes of gorgeous scholastic 
 butterflies hatched from this dull cocoon. 
 
 June 21, 1894. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Endion Cottage, 
 Long Lake, N. Y. 
 [Postmarked: July 2 1,1 894 J 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 Your somewhat hysterical note reached me just 
 as I was leaving Cambridge, and since I reached 
 this loafer's paradise I have melted into a spiritual 
 
 16 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 jelly fish, with a corresponding amount of energy 
 for letter writing or any other occupation of 
 civilized man. I sleep by the week, eat by the 
 tub-full, and never have an idea from one day's 
 end to another. The hotel, which is a mile up the 
 lake, is full of a dull spawn, only human by virtue 
 of being made in the likeness of an outraged God. 
 My single encounter with the sex has not bristled 
 with poetry, for though I sat with her an hour 
 every attempt at self-revelation on her part was 
 met by my exclamation, unuttered but passion- 
 ate, "O brisky juvenal, and eke most lovely 
 Jew!" Finding no earthly lips to breathe fire into 
 the clay of my longing, I lie doggedly on my back 
 under the pines and wait the descent of the 
 goddess. Heaven send her soon, or I shall be past 
 kissing! To do the place justice though, it is very 
 beautiful, and only needs a remotely adequate 
 Comer to pant through the blueness^ in order to 
 put me in direct communication with Helicon and 
 Castaly. 
 
 I suppose you are swimming through rose- 
 colored seas of song, with wan breasts glimmering 
 
 * "Come then, complete incompletlon, O comer, 
 Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer!" 
 
 Browning: "Wanting is — what?" 
 
 17 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 up toward your amorous lips — in other words 
 that you have no end of a cinch on Apollo and 
 are as much one of Venus^s cosseted darlings as 
 you bade fair to be when I left you. Please keep 
 me informed concerning the various stages of 
 
 your nearness to 's soul. I presume you 
 
 realize what sort of a risk you run, and in view 
 of our talk about direct and indirect passion it 
 would be supererogatory for me to hint at my 
 firm conviction that the young lady in question is 
 deeply conversant with the fact that a straight 
 line is the shortest distance between two points, 
 and that if you propose to work out any little 
 problems in spiritual geometry with her, you will 
 have to accept the theorem. 
 
 All my plans of work have crumbled away; I 
 simply lie and cumber the earth, outrageously 
 contented. I feel myself drifting toward the dam- 
 nable heresy that the unlit lamp and the ungirt 
 loin^ have their advantages. Can't you throw me 
 a rope in the shape of a lyric idea? I should not 
 know what to do with it, but it would comfort me. 
 
 Beseechingly, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 1 "And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
 Is — the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin." 
 
 Browning: " The Statue and the Bust." 
 I8 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 (1894) 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 Endion Cottage, 
 
 Long Lake, N. Y. 
 
 [July, 1894.] 
 
 Dear Rob: 
 
 Your letter reached me just as I was leaving 
 Cambridge for this hole in the Adirondacks, where 
 myself and my sister propose to sleep the summer 
 away. It is a stunning place as far as natural 
 beauty is concerned, but as yet not even a re- 
 motely adequate Comer has consented to pant 
 through the blueness. Besides the deer and the 
 bears there is nothing to commune with, and the 
 single social resource is a hotel a mile up the lake, 
 where polypous New Yorkers vaguely swarm. 
 Accordingly there is no excuse for me if I do not 
 do some good work in one line or another, but I 
 greet my opportunity listlessly, with an unlit 
 lamp and an ungirt loin, and simply lie under the 
 pine trees and cumber the earth in a state of out- 
 rageous content. I deeply commiserate you, if you 
 propose to stay in that hell's kitchen all summer 
 "dribbling biographical details and cheap criti- 
 cism." Your outlook on the teacher's mission 
 does not seem pregnantly optimistic. I was glad 
 
 19 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 to hear that Bulfinch is so near completion — the 
 thing must have been a vile bother. . . . 
 
 I hope you will cleave to the plan of coming 
 east in September. We will have that dinner at 
 Marliave's which missed fire last spring and 
 drink a bottle of Chianti to the forgetting of 
 sorrows. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Mrs. C. H. Toy 
 
 Camp Endion. 
 Long Lake, N. Y. 
 [August, 1894.] 
 Dear Mrs. Toy: 
 
 . . . Three bears have been shot on the bor- 
 ders of the lake since we came, one of them on the 
 spot where we had picnicked the day previous. 
 For a decadent spirit, a bewildered moth about the 
 candle of latter-day Illumination, I maintain this 
 is getting pretty near to Nature's naked bosom. 
 Indeed, the forest is no toy forest, but rustles 
 and billows away on every hand in miles on miles 
 of reverberant color. I can do nothing with it. 
 Its brutal mindlessness, its huge insouciance y 
 awes and humiliates me. It has away of looking 
 over your head with a gay and ferocious oblivion 
 of your interesting personality that puts you out 
 
 20 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 of countenance. As you lie on your back under 
 these gigantic pines and listen to the inarticulate 
 multitudinous life of the thing, you find yourself 
 reversing the Fichtean telescope, and coming 
 reluctantly to believe that perhaps God could 
 manage to think his thoughts without pouring 
 himself through just your highly ingenious brain. 
 I did not know to be sure that the contrary con- 
 viction was at the base of all my thinking, until 
 the negation of it was thus thrust into my face — 
 but so it is, and the experience is desperately 
 debilitating. I have developed a crooning fond- 
 ness for the Zeitgeist, now that it looks like a 
 fever-clot in the eternal brain, and as I begin to 
 suspect that the voice of many prophets prophesy- 
 ing is as the noon-fly and the strident midge to 
 vex the ears and eyes of God. 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 43 Gray's, 
 Cambridge. 
 Dear Rob: 
 
 I am in a tight place and need a little money to 
 tide me over till the Harvard goose begins to lay 
 her meagre eggs. Can you lend me fifty on our 
 
 21 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 Bulfinch expectations? I feel very mean to ask 
 for it, but being in a hole is being in a hole, and 
 the situation transcends philosophy. I shall want 
 it for a couple of months at the longest. 
 In haste, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 Sept. 27, 1894. 
 
 If you are short yourself, you wont hesitate to 
 confess, of course. 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 43 Gray's, 
 Cambridge. 
 [October, '94.] 
 Dear Rob: 
 
 Your note, with enclosed check, reached me 
 yesterday. The aptness of old Bulfinch's remit- 
 tance (was Bulfinch the Book or the Man? My 
 concepts concerning him have acquired a mythic 
 vagueness) — the aptness of the remittance, I 
 say, is such as to give a factitious and theatrical 
 tinge to the transaction. I hope you have not 
 tampered with the Facts of History, for it is 
 comforting to think that the ravens still come so 
 opportunely to feed the hungering prophet. I had 
 
 22 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 quite made up my mind not to take any of the 
 proceeds, as your work on the book after I left it 
 must have far exceeded my own Httle scissorings 
 and pastings, but necessity is the mother of Hes, 
 and I accept as brazenly as if it was my due, 
 not however, without a surreptitious pang of 
 gratitude. . . . 
 
 As always, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 43 Gray's Hall. 
 Cambridge. 
 Dear Rob: 
 
 You will forgive me for not sooner answering 
 your kind letter, when you call to mind your early 
 morning and midnight coping with the English 
 22 fortnightly. After a long season of prayer and 
 watching, I feel that I must turn a deaf ear to 
 your alluring invitation, and have written Her- 
 rick definitely declining the position. I do this 
 with a full realization of how much I am giving 
 up, both materially and spiritually. I am sure 
 that an experience of Chicago life would have 
 been a good thing for me, and it goes without 
 saying that the renewed companionship would 
 
 23 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 have been no end jolly. At the same time, there 
 are other considerations, which I have set forth 
 at length in my letter to Herrick and will not 
 bore you by repeating here, which make it clear 
 to me that I should remain here next year, and 
 accept the instructorship which Hill offers me, 
 with a prospect, dim perhaps but cherishable, of 
 pinching a fellowship at the end of it. The mes- 
 sage which Miss Mott-Smith was gracious enough 
 to couple with yours lends an added pang to the 
 renunciation, but I must be strong to heed not. 
 With sincerest gratitude for your kindness in the 
 matter and as sincere regret that I cannot now 
 see my way clear to joining you in spreading the 
 gospel of sweetness and light, I remain 
 Faithfully yours, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 April 25, 1895. 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 43 Gray's Hall, 
 Cambridge. 
 Dear Rob: 
 
 I have called several times on Damon without 
 finding him at home. Hill, I believe, has spoken 
 
 24 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 to him about the Chicago position, and I believe 
 he is very likely to accept it if it is offered him. 
 He is, in my opinion, the best man for your pur- 
 poses now at Harvard, with the possible excep- 
 tion of Young, to whom the Rajah has also tenta- 
 tively broached the subject. I know less about 
 Young myself, but he is in high favor here among 
 the undergraduates, and enjoys, I understand, 
 the light of the Rajah's countenance. I have 
 compunctious visi tings every now and then, as 
 I think of the friendly time we might have had 
 together next year. You will, however, dwell only 
 sporadically upon this earth, and I could not fol- 
 low you, except by way of imaginative sympathy, 
 into the interstellar spaces which will be your 
 real abiding-place — whence comes abatement of 
 the pang of renunciation. I hope you will make 
 your visit east as early as possible that we may 
 have a few days' usufruct of you before your 
 wings sprout. 
 
 Hastily, 
 
 Will. 
 
 May 9, 1895. 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 45 Gray's Hall, 
 
 Cambridge. 
 Dear Rob: 
 
 You are immensely kind to bestow upon me 
 the honors of groomsmanship. I accept with 
 delight, duly tempered with a sense of my un- 
 worthiness. I have today received a letter from 
 my people which changes the outlook for me 
 somewhat, as it makes it necessary for me to 
 reap a larger harvest of shekels than I have any 
 immediate prospect of doing here. If you have 
 not as yet made an offer of the Chicago position 
 to any one else could you possibly hold it open 
 until you come East? Do not think of doing so 
 if it involves any risk or inconvenience on either 
 your part or Herrick's, but if you are both willing, 
 I should be glad. I hope you will not think I take 
 an altogether mercenary view of the situation: 
 you must take the spiritual sub-intention for 
 granted. I shall write Herrick to-day, if I can 
 bring myself to brave the scorn which my 
 tergiversation will merit at his hands. 
 
 Faithfully, 
 May i8, 1895. W. V. M. 
 
 26 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 On July 3, 1895, Moody and I sailed for Europe, 
 landing on the 15th at Antwerp, where we were 
 joined for a short trip through Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, 
 Lille, Amiens, and Beauvais by Professor Gates. 
 Moody's delight in the beauty of the cathedrals, the 
 picturesqueness of the landscapes, and the bits of talk 
 with peasants, servants, and railway acquaintances 
 which he never failed to snatch, was a constant pleas- 
 ure. The easy transitions his mind made from poetic 
 feeling and imagery to the broadest colloquial humor 
 made him an incomparable companion. At Amiens, 
 for example, he calls the delicate rose-window of the 
 cathedral "God's spiderweb"; at Comines, on the 
 border of France, charmed with the pure French of the 
 waitress, he asks the names of all the viands, and in 
 return communicates that the English name of rasp- 
 berry jam is ''Red-goo," and with a solemnity that 
 convulses us watches her efforts to reproduce it, with 
 much rolling of the R. 
 
 On the 26th, Mr. Gates having left for Paris, we 
 started on a short walking tour through Brionne, 
 I'Hotellerie, Lisieux, Caen, Saint-Lo, Tessy, and Vire. 
 At Caen, on a rainy afternoon. Moody made the first 
 sketch of the poem which eventually, after much 
 revision, became "Jetsam." At Tessy-sur-Vire we 
 were awakened before dawn one mornmg by the 
 bugles of a regiment passing up one of the narrow 
 streets — a valorous music strangely impressive in 
 that darkness and silence. Moody has commemorated 
 it in the speech of the Third Youth in Act iv of the 
 "Masque of Judgment": 
 
 27 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 "But always ere the dayspring took the sky, 
 
 Somewhere the silver trumpets were aery, — 
 
 Sweet, high, oh, high and sweet! 
 
 What voice could summon so but the Soul's Paraclete? 
 
 Whom should such voices call but me, to dare and die? 
 
 O ye asleep here in the eyrie town, 
 
 Ye mothers, babes, and maids, and aged men, 
 
 The plain is full of foe-men ! Turn again — 
 
 Sleep sound, or waken half 
 
 Only to hear our happy bugles laugh 
 
 Lovely defiance down, 
 
 As through the steep 
 
 Grey streets we sweep, 
 
 Each horse and man a ribbed fan to scatter all that chaff!" 
 
 Under date August 26th I find in my journal the 
 following entry : 
 
 "Boat [Rouen] to Caudebec; thence to Yvetot on 
 foot; thence to Havre. Met on the open road an old 
 man dressed very meagrely, with slippers open at the 
 toes, ragged shirt, and bare head, who lifted his hands 
 eloquently, and chanted to the empty landscape: 
 
 i 
 
 wg 
 
 ^ 
 
 Pourquoi? Pourquoi? 
 
 This experience was the germ of the poem, "Old 
 Pourquoi," written many years later. 
 
 We returned to America in September, and he imme- 
 diately went to Chicago and began work as an instructor 
 in the English Department of Chicago University. 
 
 28 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 Boston, 
 Sept. 17, 1895. 
 
 Dear Rob: 
 
 I reached home yesterday and am stopping 
 here a few days to get my books packed, after 
 which I shall make my descent on Chicago. I 
 should reach the University Friday afternoon or 
 Saturday morning next. Can you secure me or 
 suggest to me a temporary abiding-place, from 
 the vantage shelter of which I may survey the 
 field of batde, learn the rudiments of tactic and 
 become conversant with the bristling vocabulary 
 of arms? 
 
 Will telegraph or write when I decide upon a 
 train, but do not take the trouble to be at home 
 on my advent. You could leave the suggestion as 
 to boarding house prominently posted to catch 
 my hungering eye. 
 
 In haste, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 39 Commonwealth Ave. 
 
 29 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Josephine Preston Peahody 
 
 My dear Miss Peabody: 
 
 I have put off sending you the verses with the 
 na'lve thought of using them for a Hnk between 
 the old Cambridge Hfe and this new one. Scoff at 
 my superstition, but do not too scornfully entreat 
 the pathetic little versicle of a bond-bearer, shiv- 
 ering with the double knowledge of the portentous 
 mission and his own objective comicality. Cam- 
 bridge — mellow and autumnal — begins already 
 to take on really mythic colors — to loom sym- 
 bolic, under the stress of this relentless prairie 
 light and vast featureless horizon. I begin to 
 believe that your charge against me of theatrical- 
 ity was just — that all my life there in the east 
 was a sort of tragi-farce, more or less consciously 
 composed, so rudely awake and in earnest is 
 everything here. . . . 
 
 I do not know what this place is going to do for 
 me, but am sure of its potency — its alchemical 
 power to change and transmute. It is appallingly 
 ugly for one thing — so ugly that the double cur- 
 tain of night and sleep does not screen the aching 
 sense. For another thing it is absorbing — crude 
 juice of life — intellectual and social protoplasm. 
 
 30 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 Far aloft hovers phantom Poetry, no longer my 
 delicate familiar. But I dream of another coming 
 of hers, a new companionship more valorous and 
 simple-hearted. 
 
 Chicago University 
 Sept. 22, 1895. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 [Chicago, 
 October 2, 1895.] 
 
 Your letter came yesterday, with cheek on the 
 smooth cheek of another — a friendlier pair nor 
 a tunefuller ever stretched wing together. Riding 
 to town on some sort of transfigured chariot that 
 whilom was a railway car, I perused them. Rest 
 of morning spent shopping in the New Jerusalem, 
 walking on golden pavements, and interwarbling 
 on the theme of shirts and socks with whatever 
 seraphic creatures had found it good that day to 
 put on the habit and estate of shop-girls for the 
 glory of God and the furtherance of his kingdom. 
 Returning, the lake allured me — one topaz. 
 Re-reading of letters. Throbbing of the topaz 
 heart: opening and shutting of the sunlight: 
 bursting to bloom of some sudden impalpable 
 
 31 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 enveloping flower of the air, with the scent 
 thereof. The twentieth century dates from yes- 
 terday, and we are its chosen ; if not as signs set 
 in the heavens of its glory, at least as morning 
 birds that carolled to it, mindless of the seductive 
 and quite palpable worm. 
 
 More later — brutally busy. 
 
 W 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 [CmcAGO, 
 October 23, 1895.] 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 I have so far made but miserly return for that 
 bully long letter you wrote in the purpureal flush 
 of reconciliation and renascent duality — or let 
 me say, and try to think, trinity — with the 
 Bard. If you knew the beast Chicago, the paw- 
 ing and glaring of it, you would not find me hard 
 to forgive. I have been in the condition of the 
 Kluger Schneiderlein in the bear-pit: it has taken 
 all my frightened dexterity to keep out of the 
 jaws of the creature. Now that I have learned its 
 ways a trifle, and can make it crack my nuts and 
 dance to my fiddling, the first use I make of my 
 loosened faculties is to beg forgiveness for past 
 
 32 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 shortcoming, and plead for more letters. I am 
 eager to know how you find Dvorak, whether 
 New York keys you up or spiritually ham-strings 
 you, whether the fair, the chaste, the inexpressive 
 She has throbbed out of the circumambient 
 nebula; what you and the Muse find to talk about 
 under the sheets, now you are decently married 
 — of all of which and much more I demand an 
 immediate and circumstantial report. 
 
 For my own part I have been having a highly 
 exciting time. I have two classes — one of forty, 
 the other of twenty — nearly two-thirds of whom 
 are girls. Picture my felicity when I inform you 
 that far from the frowsy, bedraggled, anemic, 
 simpering creatures I anticipated, half of them at 
 least are stars. I regret that popular usage should 
 have dechromatized the term, for I mean stars 
 of the most authentic stellarity and the most 
 convincing twinkle. Lecturing before them is like 
 a singing progress from Bootes to the Lyre, with 
 wayfaring worlds to lift the chorus. At the begin- 
 ning I made an honest man*s effort to talk about 
 the qualities of style and the methods of descrip- 
 tion, but I am a weak vessel. Now I drool bliss- 
 fully about God in his world, with occasional 
 wadings into spumy Styx and excursions into the 
 
 33 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 empyrean. My work has been heavier so far than 
 I fondly hoped it would be, and I can see little 
 chance ahead for sleeping on Latmos. I experience 
 aching diastoles,^ however, and that is the great 
 thing to my thinking. To be a poet is a much 
 better thing than to write poetry — out here at 
 least, watched by these wide horizons, beckoned 
 to by these swift streamers of victorious sunset. 
 After the fall term my work will be lighter, then 
 I shall try a night out, on a bed of lunary. 
 
 I have just had a letter from , air rarified, 
 
 sky greyish, with half-hints of opal and dove's 
 breast, a confused twittering from the hedges, not 
 unpleasing. Tenuous, but tense, like a harp string 
 in the treble. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Josephine Preston Peabody 
 
 [Autumn, 1895.] 
 
 Tell you about it? Doth the wind know its 
 
 wound, wherefore it groaneth? It is only an 
 
 affliction of the stars, at least this recent bundle 
 
 of pangs; they are of those that eat the hearts 
 
 * A word we had borrowed from physiology — the dilatation 
 of the heart in beating — and used as a name for moods of spiritual 
 elation. See the Introduction. 
 
 34 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 of crazy-headed comets zigzaging across the 
 Zodiac. Doubtless the incontinent closing of the 
 moon-flower dailies left me more defenseless 
 against these malign astral inroads, but the root of 
 the matter is some sort of cosmic apoplexy or 
 ear-ache of which I happen to be the centre. 
 To Uav has the falling-sickness or the everlasting 
 doldrums, and selects me to ache through — that 
 is all. If I were not precociously aware of the 
 devices of his Celestial Completeness I should 
 suppose quite simply that Chicago was boring 
 me to death, that my work was meaningless 
 drudgery, that the crowd of spiteful assiduous 
 nothings that keep me from It (Ah, the vague 
 sweet-shrouding mute arch vocable!) were tanta- 
 lizing me into stupid rage, and stinging my eye- 
 balls into blindness of the light. When in moments 
 of weakness I transfer the blame for my inward 
 dissatisfaction and disarray to outward things, I 
 am on the point of trundling my little instructorial 
 droning-gear into Lake Michigan, and stepping 
 out west or south on the Open Road, a free man 
 by the grace of God, and a tramp by Rachel's 
 intercession. But of course I know that I should 
 only be changing garments, and that I should 
 wake up some fine night and find my hay-stack 
 
 35 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 bristling with just such goblin dissension as now 
 swarms over my counter-pane. However, it is 
 easy to stand dissension. Anything is better than 
 that awful hush settling down on everything, as if 
 To Uav had suddenly discovered himself to be 
 stuffed with sawdust, and lost interest in his own 
 ends and appetites. And that silence your brave 
 words have scared back. I really begin to think 
 you are Wise, and to stand in awe of you. That 
 is a more convincing presentment of the "trans- 
 scendent identity," that which shows it casting 
 its own brain on one side as a worn out accessory, 
 holding its own heart in its hands to burn, like 
 the angel in Dante's dream. I pay you the com- 
 pliment of believing that you would be capable 
 of that, and I find it illustrious, and with your 
 gracious permission propose to set it for a sign, 
 right at a cross-roads where I sometimes skulk 
 belated, peering fearful-eyed for Hecate. 
 
 The truth of the matter is, I suppose, that I am 
 dissatisfied to the point of desperation with the 
 kind of life that is possible out here. I used to 
 have days in the east when a hedge of lilac over a 
 Brattle Street fence or a strenuous young head 
 caught against a windy sweep of sunset on Har- 
 vard Bridge, filled me with poignant perceptions 
 
 36 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 of a freer life of sense and spirit, — and I was fre- 
 quently vaguely unhappy over it. But after all 
 one had n't far to go before finding some refine- 
 ment of feeling, some delicate arabesque of con- 
 vention, to help make up for the lack of liberty. 
 Out here there is even less liberty (because less 
 thought) and there is nothing — or next to 
 nothing — to compensate. If my lines were cast 
 in other places, — even other places in this gigan- 
 tic ink-blot of a town — I could make shift to 
 enjoy my breath. I should make a very happy 
 and efficient peanut- vender on Clark or Randolph 
 Street, because the rush and noise of the blood in 
 the city's pulse would continually solicit and 
 engage me. The life of a motor-man is not without 
 exhilarating and even romantic features, and an 
 imaginative boot-black is lord of unskirted realms. 
 But out here, where there is no city life to gaze at, 
 nothing to relieve the gaseous tedium of a mush- 
 room intellectuality, no straining wickedness or 
 valiant wrestling with hunger to break the spec- 
 tacle of Gospel-peddling comfort, — the imagina- 
 tion doth boggle at it! 
 
 2>7 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Josephine Preston Peahody 
 
 [Probably Autumn, 1895.] 
 
 Mr. Ruskin would not be happy in Chicago — 
 God is a very considerable personage — So is Mr. 
 Rockefeller — So am I, but for a different reason 
 
 — Towers of Babel are out of fashion — Ride a 
 Rambler — Four fifths of William Blake would 
 not be accepted for publication by the Harvard 
 Advocate — Life at a penny plain is d — d dear — 
 Eat H. O. — The poet in a golden clime was born, 
 but moved away early — A man may yearn over 
 his little brothers and sisters and still be a good 
 Laodicean — Art is not long, but it takes a good 
 while to make it short — There will be no opera 
 or steel engraving in the twentieth century — An 
 angle-worm makes no better bait because it has 
 fed on Caesar — Wood fires are dangerous — So 
 is life at a penny plain, but for a different reason 
 
 — Towers of Babel, though out of fashion, are 
 well received in Chicago — There were no birds 
 in the Tower of Babel — God is a very considerable 
 personage — So is Olga Nethersole — So are you, 
 but for a different reason — I am owner of the 
 spheres, and grow land-poor — Literature is a 
 
 38 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 fake and Nordau is its prophet — God bless 
 McKinley — Love is not Time's fool: he was 
 turned off for lack of wit — Eve was born before 
 Ann Radcliffe, so the world goes darkling — 
 Tom 's a cold — I am old-rose, quoth 'a — God's 
 pittykins 'ield ye, zany, for thy apple-greenness! 
 *T would gi' the Ding-an-Sich a colic to set eyes 
 on 'e — Natheless Monet was a good painter, and 
 color-blind — 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Dec. I, 1895. 
 My dear Dan: 
 
 Day after crowded day I have looked at your 
 delightful long letter, and said, in the sweet 
 babble of the Little Cricket Thing, ^ that I would 
 answer it sooner or later, when I was not as busy 
 as hell. Then the speaking lines about your reclin- 
 ing on the Paderewskian bosom, arrived, with 
 their tantalizing suggestion of dim-lighted rooms, 
 transcendentalized rum toddy, and an auroral 
 head uttering gold vaticination. I was jaundiced 
 
 1 He refers to the parody by a Harvard friend, already men- 
 tioned, of some lines in his song " My love is gone into the East." 
 See page xxvii. 
 
 39 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 with jealousy for a week, thinking of the fulness 
 of your service before the great altars, and the 
 wretched scantlings of effort I was permitted 
 to give, standing afar off. To tell the truth, I 
 have n't the faintest splinter of sympathy for 
 the dolorousness of your condition, as set forth in 
 your letter. To be a runner of scales and to work 
 at canon and fugue by the job, strikes me as the 
 most enviable estate of man. Every scale you 
 run, every fugue you hammer out, is laying up 
 treasure in heaven — not by way of communal 
 walls and pavements only, but especially for the 
 house which your own winged self-ship shall 
 inhabit. I have as much respect for you as for 
 a disgruntled peach seed, which should cry out 
 against the lack of social opportunities in an 
 underground community. And besides the ulti- 
 mate satisfaction, there is the daily delight of 
 pottering over your tools, trying their edge, 
 polishing their surfaces, feeling their delectable 
 ponderableness. No, you must go for comfort to 
 somebody who does n't have a sense of radiant 
 bien-etre in fitting a new pen into a holder. 
 
 Which reminds me that, having a few hours 
 last week for ecstatic contemplation of my navel, 
 I emitted a more or less piercing yawp there- 
 
 40 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 concerning, in the form of a new treatment of the 
 moon theme. ^ I have unfortunately bundled off 
 the only copy to the Singer, so that I cannot send 
 you the product, but if you are still interested you 
 may ask her to pass it on to you. You will no 
 doubt find much to dislike in it, but I hope that 
 some of it may meet with your approval. You 
 will recognize the elements drawn from that unfor- 
 gettable night in the fields at Chartres. Having 
 temporarily exorcised this particular demon, I 
 am losing sleep over a project for a play, dealing 
 with a character and a situation which seem to me 
 intensely significant and eloquent, that of Slatter, 
 the "New Mexico Messiah," who has been doing 
 things in Denver of late. But I need not bother 
 you with dough still in the kneading.^ 
 
 I am looking forward to some bully good talks 
 at Christmas, and some good music at your 
 expense, and a bottle of wine wherein we may 
 drink to the meek brows of Her and It. Mean- 
 while, write. 
 
 Will. 
 
 ^ The poem started in Caen the preceding summer. It eventu- 
 ally became "Jetsam." 
 
 2 "The Faith Healer" did not, as a matter of fact, take on 
 final shape until shortly before its author's death. 
 
 41 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Mary L, Mason 
 
 Chicago, 
 Dec. 12, 1895. 
 
 My dear Mrs. Mason, 
 
 You are wofully ignorant of the sweet uses of 
 memory if you can picture me forgetting your 
 delightful invitation to spend a fraction of my 
 Christmas week at your home. . . . 
 
 Whisper it not in Gath, but I hunger and thirst 
 after the East with a carnal longing. I thought I 
 had relegated all you subtlety-spinning New 
 Englanders to the limbo of the effete, where you 
 were tolerantly allowed to exist and confuse eco- 
 nomic relations only because you are, after all, 
 rather nice. But of late, in the still watches, your 
 niceness grows luminous and summoning. I still 
 disapprove of you, but I want to see you very bad. 
 
 Expectantly, 
 William Vaughn Moody. 
 
 To Josephine Preston Peahody 
 
 Chicago, 
 Dec. 15 [16?], 1895. 
 
 Just a word to tell you something of the im- 
 mense good your letter did me. After I sent off 
 
 42 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 the poem [''Jetsam"], the inevitable revulsion 
 set in : I lost faith in it, and then, being in a state 
 of nerves, took the easy step of losing faith in 
 myself and the future. Still I kept hoping against 
 hope that you would find a stray line to like and 
 praise. When the days passed, and your silence 
 pronounced gentle but final condemnation, I sat 
 down and read the lines over. They had fallen 
 dead ink. The paper dropped to the floor; I sat, 
 elbows on desk and head in hands, and thought. 
 I had felt the thing, I had put my best breath into 
 the lines, and here they were, not only dead past 
 hope, but graceless, repulsive, without the dig- 
 nity or pathos of death. What then? For a long 
 time I did not have heart squarely to face the 
 issue — Life without that hope and solace, that 
 pillar of smoke by day and of fire by night, — 
 could I live it out so, in some sort of grey content? 
 Outside my window the moon came out over the 
 turbulent brute groping of the brown surge, walk- 
 ing in light as when she tormented the lowered 
 eyes of Job, tempting him from Jehovah. She 
 called me out with her, miles along the coast, and 
 as I stumbled along in the vague light, gradually 
 the mere effort I had made to say something of 
 her wonder, began to seem its own justification. 
 
 43 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 When I came back the pages I gathered from the 
 floor were farther than ever from adequacy, but 
 somehow I cared for them, as one cares for a dead 
 thing one picks up in the hedges, thinking of its 
 brave fight for life. Then your letter came, and I 
 read, stupidly at first, not understanding, your 
 words of generous praise. I knew you were artist 
 enough not to utter them merely for friendship's 
 sake, and when I understood them, they filled me 
 with joy which would have been out of all propor- 
 tion to the matter at stake except that for me it 
 was one of those mysterious pivotal small things 
 on which the future turns silent and large. So you 
 had actually liked it all, and were glad it had been 
 done? Then it was not dead after all; my eyes 
 had been seared? I read it through in the flush of 
 pleasure and found it good, — absurdly, ravish- 
 ingly good ! So I took a deep breath, and sat down 
 to write it over, with the sharp light of remembered 
 disillusion on its weaknesses, and the memories of 
 my night walk to beckon me on. I shall crave 
 judgment on the result at Christmas, for I pur- 
 pose to make a descent on Boston then, ravenous 
 with a three-month's abstinence from subtlety- 
 spinning. ... I have . . . written to 
 
 again. He has owed me a letter since September, 
 
 44 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 but God knows who has the rights of this wretch- 
 edness, and of all our funny little Pantheon the 
 absurd little god who gets the least of my service 
 is the one labelled ** Personal Dignity." I can- 
 not think of any personal sacrifice I would not 
 make to convince him of my friendship, or rather 
 to establish once more the conditions which make 
 friendship possible. I hope this does n't sound 
 superior; it is not so meant. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Dec. 15, 1895. 
 
 1. Shall reach New York . . . Dec. 19. 
 
 2. Shall reach Boston . . . Dec. 26. 
 
 3. Must leave Boston . . . Dec. 31. 
 
 4. Shall leave Boston . . . God knows. 
 
 All except last date subject to change without 
 notice. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 The hope of a vacation, expressed in the following 
 letter in a characteristic metaphor, was illusory. Save 
 for a ten-day bicycle trip with Mr. Schevill in the 
 following June Moody seems to have stuck close to the 
 "shop" for many months. In August he writes that 
 he is to work all winter, in order to get a nine-months' 
 
 45 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 holiday beginning in the spring. In the letter of 
 November 24 he speaks of having had "fourteen con- 
 secutive months of hack teaching," a statement which 
 was not literally true, but which doubtless seemed true 
 to his eager mind, always longing for fruitful leisure, 
 fretful under drudgery. He eventually got away, as 
 will be seen, in March, 1897. 
 
 To Mrs. C. H. Toy 
 
 Chicago, 
 Jan. 6, 1896. 
 My dear Mrs. Toy: 
 
 ... It seemed very good to see a Cambridge 
 face again, especially against this background of 
 phantasmagoric ugliness. I long for something 
 beautiful to look at with a really agonized and 
 fleshly longing. My eye is horny with smoke and 
 the outlines of grain elevators. But I must not 
 enlarge upon my ''state," since day is at hand. 
 Looking up through the murk and the swaying 
 shadow of seaweed I can just catch a hint of 
 vanishing bubbles and green shattered needles of 
 light. Two months more and I shall lift my 
 encompassed head above the waters. Then off 
 with the diving gear and ho for the groves of 
 banyan and of cocoanut, and the little Injuns 
 that grow between ! . . . 
 
 46 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Mary L. Mason 
 
 Chicago. 
 Jan. II, 1896. 
 
 My dear Mrs. Mason, 
 
 I have postponed writing because I suspected 
 you would rather have a letter written com- 
 posedly out of a rising desire for talk or its substi- 
 tute, than a hurried note setting forth with a 
 prim gasp that I had got here with no broken 
 bones. I have not quite got accustomed to the 
 raw bite of things again, after humoring my skin 
 with the delicate eastern impingements. Indeed 
 I have been since getting back as helpless a victim 
 to the blue devils as it is in my temperament ever 
 to be. The gross result of the life one can lead in 
 a place like this is satisfactory enough, but the 
 net result, the fine slow-oozing crystal distillation, 
 is tragically small — and I fancy that for such as 
 I the unsublimated mass must always keep a 
 disheartening suggestion. The enervating thing 
 about the place is its shallow kindness. People 
 are so eager to give you credit for virtues that you 
 do not possess that you feel ashamed to put forth 
 those that are yours. Then when you do take 
 heart of grace, and do or say or think a really good 
 
 47 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 thing, and win the facile applause, you have a 
 bad taste in the mouth to think that any jigster's 
 trick would have won you the same magnificent 
 triumph. I sigh, like the ancient worthy, for a 
 stern friend, one who will not be gulled by any 
 thimble-rig sophistry, who will puncture with 
 sweet skepticism my little soap-bubble eloquences, 
 and by so doing give me heart to try and be wise. 
 I recognize of course that the wish is a weak one, 
 that I ought to be my own detective, gendarme, 
 judge, and hangman; and I have made some 
 flabby efforts to execute these functions upon my- 
 self, but so far with indifferent success. Do you 
 think a wife would do any good? I have cast 
 appalled glances at that ultimate rigor of self- 
 discipline, but my eyes have been blest by no 
 reassuring light. Something I must have to key 
 life up, to give it musical pitch and the knit 
 coherence of music. If I were free I could get all 
 that out of my little gift and great passion for the 
 poet's craft, but hampered as I am by intellectual 
 drudgery that is only one burden more, and adds 
 the last note of poignancy to the tedium of the 
 days. I have lately thought with envy amounting 
 
 to wickedness of D 's complete service of the 
 
 thing that seems to him real under the sun : if he 
 
 48 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 were not so dear, I could find it in my heart to 
 hate him cordially for it. 
 
 Another thing that afflicts my soul is the deli- 
 cate strange winter light that lies over a cer- 
 tain hill called Milton, at the rising of the sun 
 and the going down thereof, and the tentative 
 fluttering talk of a girl who is destined to tread 
 much in the lonely places of life and suffer much. 
 Fortunately, there is there too the talk of a 
 brave woman who sees life clearly and sees it 
 whole, and whose verdict is, I am sure, that in 
 spite of suffering and lonely places it is worth 
 while. 
 
 I have not been able to get the edition of 
 Keats's letters that I wanted you to see; I hope 
 you will like the little picture which I send in- 
 stead. 
 
 Faithfully yours, 
 
 William Vaughn Moody. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Sunday, Jan. 19, 1896. 
 Dear Dan, 
 
 The news you send about your wrist is quite 
 heart-breaking. I have not written sooner because 
 I could not find it in my breast to speak comfort, 
 
 49 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 feeling there only rebellion and disgust at the 
 world order and its ghastly lack of breeding. How- 
 did you precipitate it? I can only fall back on 
 thoughts of Schumann and his lame finger or 
 whatever it was that spoiled him for concert 
 gymnastics, and made him a minstrel in the court 
 celestial. At any rate that question of composing 
 away from the piano is settled, with a right 
 parental emphasis from the slipper of Mischance. 
 ... I will spare you the usual admonition about 
 the rigidity of your upper lip, in spite of the natural 
 longing I feel to use the heirloom. 
 
 I have been brutally busy since getting back, on 
 Uncle Horace's book,^ so that all my schemes of 
 spiritual conquest are done up in moth-balls for 
 the time being. . . . One o'clock midnight, and 
 the morrow flames responsibility. Hire a type- 
 writer — marry one if necessary — and we will 
 annihilate space. I have a creature to tell you 
 about — but a Creature ! 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 1 Some editorial work he had undertaken for Mr. Horace 
 Scudder. 
 
 50 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Chicago, Feb. i6, 1896. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 I have just heard from your sister-in-law of 
 your enforced furlough. I am not going to help 
 you curse your luck, knowing your native capa- 
 biHties in that direction to be perfectly adequate, 
 but my Methodist training urges me to give you 
 an epistolary hand-grasp, the purport of which is 
 ''Keep your sand.'' I could say other things, not 
 utterly pharisaical. I could say what I have often 
 said to myself, with a rather reedy tremolo per- 
 haps, but swelling sometimes into a respectable 
 diapason. ''The dark cellar ripens the wine." 
 And meanwhile, after one's eyes get used to the 
 dirty light, and one's feet to the mildew, a cellar 
 has its compensations. I have found beetles of 
 the most interesting proclivities, mice altogether 
 comradely and persuadable, and forgotten pota- 
 toes that sprouted toward the crack of sunshine 
 with a wan maiden grace not seen above. I don't 
 want to pose as resourceful, but I have seen what 
 I have seen. 
 
 The metaphor is however happily inexact in 
 your case, with Milton to retire to and Cambridge 
 
 51 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 humming melodiously on the horizon. If you can 
 only throttle your Daemon, or make him forego 
 his leonine admonition "Accomplish," and roar 
 you as any sucking dove the sweet vocable " Be," 
 — you ought to live. I have got mine trained to 
 that, pardee! and his voice grows not untunable. 
 I pick up shreds of comfort out of this or that one 
 of God's ashbarrels. Yesterday I was skating on a 
 patch of ice in the park, under a poverty-stricken 
 sky flying a pitiful rag of sunset. Some little 
 muckers were guying a slim raw-boned Irish girl 
 of fifteen, who circled and darted under their 
 banter with complete unconcern. She was in the 
 fledgling stage, all legs and arms, tall and adorably 
 awkward, with a huge hat full of rusty feathers, 
 thin skirts tucked up above spindling ankles, 
 and a gay aplomb and swing in the body that was 
 ravishing. We caught hands in midflight, and 
 skated for an hour, almost alone and quite silent, 
 while the rag of sunset rotted to pieces. I have 
 had few sensations in life that I would exchange 
 for the warmth of her hand through the ragged 
 glove, and the pathetic curve of the half-formed 
 breast where the back of my wrist touched her 
 body. I came away mystically shaken and elate. 
 It is thus the angels converse. She was something 
 
 52 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 absolutely authentic, new, and inexpressible, 
 something which only nature could mix for the 
 heart's intoxication, a compound of ragamuffin, 
 pal, mistress, nun, sister, harlequin, outcast, and 
 bird of God, — with something else bafflingly 
 suffused, something ridiculous and frail and sav- 
 age and tender. With a world offering such 
 rencontres, such aery strifes and adventures, who 
 would not live a thousand years stone dumb? I 
 would, for one — until my mood changes and I 
 come to think on the shut lid and granite lip of 
 him who has had done with sunsets and skating, 
 and has turned away his face from all manner of 
 Irish. I am supported by a conviction that at an 
 auction on the steps of the great white Throne, I 
 should bring more in the first mood than the 
 second — by several harps and a stray dulcimer. 
 I thoroughly envy you your stay at Milton — 
 wrist, Daemon, and all. You must send me a 
 lengthy account of the state of things in Cam- 
 bridge. ... If the wrist forbids writing, employ a 
 typewriter of the most fashionable tint — I will 
 pay all expenses and stand the breakage. I stipu- 
 late that you shall avoid blondes however, they 
 are fragile. 
 
 William Vaughn Moody. 
 53 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Chicago, April ii, 1896. 
 My dear Dan: 
 
 Yesterday morning mint appeared in the 
 market windows, and this morning the lake is a 
 swoon of silver and blue; — argal, I must write 
 you a letter. I have felt for the past two weeks 
 as if I had fallen heir to something, owing to 
 the fact that spring turns out to be a month 
 earlier here than in the east, and she comes over 
 the prairies with the naive confidence and sweet 
 quick surrender that she has learned from the 
 prairie girls. For the first time since your rustica- 
 tion I have ceased to envy you your domiciliation 
 among the blue hills of Milton, for my side of the 
 bubble has swung sunward and what care I if 
 it be made of kitchen soap? I walk about in 
 an amber clot of sensuousness, and feel the sap 
 mount, like a tree. I thought — and often gloom- 
 ily asseverated — that I had got over this purring 
 rapture at the general situation, legitimately the 
 gift of the primitive or the jagged. Well, I did not 
 give Nature credit for the virtue that is in her. 
 
 My work, alas, still continues to be hard. I use 
 up all my vital energies before the evening loaf 
 
 54 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 comes on, and then have force only for passive 
 delights. I stick a good round straw into a cask 
 of Spenser or Hardy, and suck myself to sleep — 
 to dream of orchards and '' golden- tongued 
 Romance with serene lute." The hard bright sun 
 of a western morning, with theme classes super- 
 imposed, reduces the golden tongue to phantom 
 thinness of song and banishes the lute into the 
 limbo of the ridiculous, but I plod on evening- 
 wards with mole-like assiduity. I have come to 
 realize the wonderful resources of passive enjoy- 
 ment better than I ever did before — perhaps 
 perversely, perhaps according to a mere instinct 
 of self-preservation against the hurry and remorse- 
 less effectiveness of life out here. Whatever the 
 cause, I have found out how good a thing it is to 
 be a silly sheep and batten on the moor, to stand 
 in cool shallows and let the water go by and the 
 minnows dart and the brook moss stretch its 
 delicate fingers. Also I seem to be coming, half 
 through disappointed effort and half through this 
 same effortlessness, to discern more clearly what 
 is worthy in human motive and admirable in 
 human achievement. It is not that I love Shake- 
 speare less, but that I love Ophelia more. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 55 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 May i6, 1896. 
 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 Your letter came this morning in time to give 
 me a goodly fit of the blues, thinking of Milton 
 in spring, and thence by easy derivation of all 
 the other excellencies from which my exiled feet 
 are held. I can't repay the pang, but as the near- 
 est thing to a heavenly affliction which I can com- 
 mand I send you a poem which I have just written 
 about the Creature I once hinted to you of — a 
 Girl who haunted the symphonies last winter. I 
 hope you will like it, because it is almost the first 
 thing I have done which has been a direct impulse 
 from ''real" life, and you know I have theories 
 about that. Also what I tried to say is a thing 
 which constitutes much of the poetry of a young 
 man's life, I think, and if I could have got it said 
 would have had a certain large interpretive value. 
 Let me know your opinion, at as great length as 
 your nerves and your nurse will permit. 
 
 Will. 
 
 56 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 WILDING FLOWER 
 
 Tonight her lids shall lift again 
 
 Slow-soft with vague desire, 
 
 And lay about my breast and brain 
 
 Their hush of lilac fire, 
 
 And I shall take the sweet of pain 
 
 As the laborer his hire. 
 
 And while the happy viols shake, 
 
 Under the paltry roof, 
 
 The web of singing worlds they make 
 
 To shelter Heaven aloof, 
 
 Our listening hearts shall build and break 
 
 Love's sempiternal woof. 
 
 O! listening heart, with all thy powers 
 
 Of white beatitude. 
 
 What is the dearest of God's dowers 
 
 To the children of his blood? 
 
 Where blow the lovesome wilding flowers 
 
 In the hollows of his wood? 
 
 That, though her ear hath never caught 
 The name men call me by, 
 
 57 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 That, though my lot from her sweet lot 
 Lyeth as sky from sky, 
 And my fain lonely hand dare not 
 Touch hers for comradery, — 
 
 Yet her shy devious lambent soul 
 
 With my slow soul should walk, 
 
 That linked like lovers we should stroll 
 
 By rivers of glad talk, 
 
 Or bow to the music's wind-control 
 
 As stalk by the lily stalk; 
 
 Yet never break, with a fooFs mean waste, 
 
 The bubble of dream sky, 
 
 All gorgeous runnelled, window-spaced, 
 
 With blaze of drifted dye, — 
 
 This is a happiness to taste 
 
 Life's farthest meanings by. 
 
 The flushed adventurous violins 
 Climbing the crudded mist, 
 The clear horn calling when it wins 
 Its tower noon-precipiced. 
 The aching oboe throat that twins 
 Night's moonward melodist, 
 58 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 Shall find naught in the heavens of air 
 
 That they may name beside 
 
 The rhythmic joyance she doth wear 
 
 Whether she go or bide, 
 
 The wood-pool lustres of her hair, 
 
 Or her lip's wistful pride. 
 
 Oath-graven and heart-historied 
 
 Shall be our marriage ring, 
 
 Though oath of dead to sheeted dead 
 
 Be a louder spoken thing; 
 
 My sign shall be upon her head 
 
 While stars do meet and sing. 
 
 Not. such a sign as women wear 
 Who bow beneath the shame 
 Of marriage insolence, and bear 
 A house- wife's faded name; 
 Nor such as passion eateth bare 
 With its carcanet of flame; 
 
 Nor such a sign as happy friend 
 Sets on his friend's dear brow, 
 When meadow pipings break and blend 
 To a key of subtle woe. 
 And the orchard says play-time 's at end, 
 Best unclasp hands and go. 
 59 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 But where she strays, in blight or blooth, 
 
 One fadeless flower she wears, 
 
 A mystic gift God gave my youth, 
 
 Whose petals dim are fears, 
 
 Awes, adorations, songs of ruth, 
 
 Hesitancies and tears. 
 
 O! heart of mine, with all thy powers, 
 
 Of strange beatitude. 
 
 What is the dearest of God's dowers 
 
 To the children of His blood? 
 
 Where blow the lovesome wilding flowers 
 
 In the hollows of His wood? 
 
 William Vaughn Moody. 
 May, 1896. 
 
 The revised form of this poem, printed in the 
 "Poems" of 1 90 1, is as follows: — 
 
 HEART'S WILD FLOWER 
 
 To-night her lids shall lift again, slow, soft, with 
 
 vague desire. 
 And lay about my breast and brain their hush of spirit 
 
 fire. 
 And I shall take the sweet of pain as the laborer his 
 
 hire. 
 
 60 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 And though no word shall e'er be said to ease the 
 
 ghostly sting, 
 And though our hearts, unhoused, unfed, must still 
 
 go wandering. 
 My sign is set upon her head while stars do meet and sing. 
 
 Not such a sign as women wear who make their fore- 
 heads tame 
 
 With life's long tolerance, and bear love's sweetest, 
 humblest name, 
 
 Nor such as passion eateth bare with its crown of 
 tears and flame. 
 
 Nor such a sign as happy friend sets on his friend's 
 
 dear brow 
 When meadow-pipings break and blend to a key of 
 
 autumn woe, 
 And the woodland says playtime's at end, best unclasp 
 
 hands and go. 
 
 But where she strays, through blight or blooth, one 
 
 fadeless flower she wears, 
 A little gift God gave my youth, — whose petals dim 
 
 were fears, 
 Awes, adorations, songs of ruth, hesitancies, and tears. 
 
 O heart of mine, with all thy powers of white beatitude. 
 What are the dearest of God's dowers to the children 
 
 of his blood? 
 How blow the shy, shy wilding flowers in the hollo-A's 
 
 of his wood ! 
 
 6i 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 May 24, 1896. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 Thanks for your painstaking and very percep- 
 tive criticism. I cannot bring myself yet to accept 
 all your strictures unconditionally, but I find them 
 all suggestively and wisely hortatory, pointing the 
 way where the real pitfalls lie for me ; and I know 
 that by the time I come to put the verses in per- 
 manent form I shall have accepted most of them 
 literally. Still, while I am still unpersuaded, let 
 me distinguish. The vague syntax of st. 11 is 
 undoubtedly mere slovenliness: the stanza shall 
 go the way of the ungirt loin. Also st. vil is as 
 you say turgid, and must go, even though it drag 
 with it the next stanza, which you like. As regards 
 the suspension of the sense in sts. iv-vi I cannot 
 agree. It seems to me that the breathlessness and 
 holding-aloof is justified by the emphasis with 
 which the concluding thought is thus given, and 
 still more by the fact that it sets the essential 
 thought off in a rounded form. It has a construc- 
 tive value, also, as contrasting with the simple 
 declaratory forms of statement which precede 
 and follow it. I fancy it corresponds in my mind 
 
 62 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 somewhat to an ''organ-point" in yours. The 
 adjectives are too many, I know; but I am a 
 little cold-blanketed and worried over your spe- 
 cific objections to phrase. " Paltry roof " is paltry, 
 I freely admit; "wind-control" and "moonward 
 melodist" are rococo as hell. But the other three 
 to which you take exception I am sure are good 
 poetry. ... I think — pardon the egotism of 
 the utterance (you would if you knew what tears of 
 failure have gone to water the obstreperous little 
 plant) — I think you are not tolerant enough of 
 the instinct for conquest in language, the attempt 
 to push out its boundaries, to win for it continu- 
 ally some new swiftness, some rare compression, 
 to distill from it a more opaline drop. Is n't it 
 possible, too, to be pedantic in the demand for 
 simplicity? It's a cry which, if I notice aright, 
 nature has a jaunty way of disregarding. Com- 
 mand a rosebush in the stress of June to purge 
 itself; coerce a convolvulus out of the paths of 
 catachresis. Amen! 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 Please be good-natured and talk back. Or no, 
 don't. Spare the arm. 
 
 63 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 [Chicago, 
 June 23, 1896.] 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 The report which you make of your lack of 
 progress in health casts a gloom over my days. 
 I am about starting for Wisconsin for a week's 
 bicycling, and the monstrous egoism of bodily 
 vigor which I feel, possesses my soul with shame. 
 The thing for you to do is to come to Chicago: 
 it is the greatest health resort going — mirahile 
 dictu. We live on bicycling, base-ball, breezes, 
 beer, and buncombe, and keep right chipper 
 mostly. Can't you come out for a while? We have 
 an extra bed-room, and if you can stand bachelor 
 shiftlessness after the golden calm of Milton 
 housekeeping, we could put you up "snugly.'* 
 The quotation marks are only a warning as to the 
 point of view. Expense need be no deterrent. 
 Walking is good all the way, and hand-outs rich 
 and plentiful. Think of it seriously. We will send 
 you back mens sana surely and sano corpore if we 
 have luck. Allons! 
 
 I have grown quite meek over the verses, as I 
 thought I should. I accept your strictures on the 
 
 64 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 suspended construction, with only the lingering 
 spiteful affirmation that two persons to whom I 
 read the poem seemed to find far less difficulty in 
 following the syntax than you assert as normal. 
 The alternative explanations of the discrepancy 
 in judgment are both too disagreeable to pursue. 
 At worst it is only one more failure ; success only 
 looms a little haughtier, a little more disdainful 
 of conquest. Esperance and set on! 
 
 I have had an enormous little adventure since 
 I wrote last. Another Girl, of course. This time 
 a Westerner par excellence — a Californian, dating 
 mentally from the age of Rousseau and Chateau- 
 briand, with geysers and cloud bursts of romanti- 
 cism, not to say sentimentality; dating spiritually 
 from the Age of Gold, or some remoter purity, 
 some Promethean dawn, some first foam-birth in 
 hyperborean seas. She likes Gibson's drawings, 
 adores Munsey's, and sings "Don't be Cross, 
 Dear" with awful unction. After this you will 
 not believe me when I say that she gave me the 
 most unbearable shiver of rapture at the recogni- 
 tion of essential girlhood that I for a long time 
 remember. Well, have you ever slept under the 
 same roof with such a person, in the country, and 
 wakened at that moment before dawn when in 
 
 65 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 the "spectral uncompounded light" the spirit Is 
 least capable of defense, when it feels only a 
 membrane separating it from the shock of joy 
 and woe as they stream from the passionate day- 
 spring, and have you felt the sense of that com- 
 mon shelter like a caress, heard through walls and 
 doors the rise and fall of her breast as an ineffable 
 rhythm swaying the sun? If you have you can 
 realize the gone feeling that possessed me when 
 she said (interpreting my own gloomy guess) that 
 my kind was not her kind, that my language was 
 not her language, and that her soul could only be 
 studious to avoid mine, as the bird flying south- 
 ward in spring avoids the hunter. I bowed assent 
 and came home. I now nurse memories and grow 
 elegiac. Come to Chicago! 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 Chicago, 
 July 14, '96. 
 
 T turned up bright and early for his fifteen 
 
 dollars, and continues to pay us little friendly 
 visits from time to time. He now has his eye on 
 the Civil Service. The Civil Service has not yet 
 
 66 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 got its eye on him, but may in the fullness of 
 time. . . . 
 
 It has been unspeakably hot — life a tragedy 
 and a tongue-lolling — flat 7 a place of penance, 
 teaching a Dantesque farce. Pray for us, thou 
 godless happy Loafer. 
 
 Please give my kindest regards to Ida. I have 
 for many weeks had it in my mind to try to phrase 
 my gratitude for her very bully tolerance of our 
 loudnesses and other iniquities this winter. Some 
 day I shall, believe me; I speak with the arrogance 
 of the professional rhetorician in daily need of 
 defence against an inner conviction that he is the 
 dumbest of God's creatures. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Josephine Preston Peabody 
 
 Chicago, July 17, 1896. 
 
 I find that the West cries out as with one voice 
 for the feathers and furbelows of feeling that you 
 Cambridge mode-makers consigned to the garret 
 decades ago. They 're a little bedraggled at times, 
 but we wear them with an air! Rousseau would 
 weep over us — Chateaubriand would call us 
 brother. I wonder if Rousseau and Chateaubri- 
 
 67 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 and were as ridiculous after all as they seem from 
 the serene middle of Harvard Square? 
 
 All this is of course (I mean this sentimentaliz- 
 ing and toy-sea-sailing) by way of "compelling 
 incident." That is the most illuminating and 
 fruitful phrase you ever gave me. Every hour 
 that I pilfer from tedium I thank the lips that 
 framed it. Alas! the better ways of gilding the 
 grey days slip from me. Apollo has gone a-hunt- 
 ing and I was n't asked. I have hung my harp 
 on a willow, where it gathers rust and caterpillars 
 with a zeal it lacked in a better cause. I am gone 
 stark dumb. I rap myself and get a sound of 
 cracked clay. A white rage seizes me at times, 
 against the pottering drudgery that has fastened 
 its lichen teeth on me and is softening down my 
 " crisp cut name and date." I echo poor Keats's 
 cry "O for ten years that I may steep myself in 
 poetry" — with the modest substitution of weeks 
 for years, and a willingness to compromise on as 
 many days if Providence will only undertake to 
 get this shiny taste of themes and literary drool 
 out of my mouth, and let me taste the waters of 
 life where they are near the well-head. To go a- 
 brook-f olio wing — O happiness, O thou bright 
 Denied! W. V. M. 
 
 68 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 [Chicago, 
 July 20, 1896.] 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 The confident tone of your last letter puts me 
 in conceit with life again. Envisage the theme job 
 with the comic or the tragic mask, as you please, 
 but not with the features sweet Nature gave you 
 — on your life. I am known in the Chicago 
 themery as the Man in the Iron Mask, and you 
 may wager I live up to the title. The chance of 
 luring you out here in August tempts me to lie 
 goldenly about the musical prospects. Now that 
 I have the strength I hasten feebly to falter that 
 they are damn poor. Not that Chicago is not 
 *' musical" — it is amazingly and egregiously so. 
 Calliope is the one Muse we recognize, and she 
 has a front spare bedroom and unlimited pie. 
 But the place is overrun with music teachers — 
 chiefly foreign — whereof I find recorded the 
 names of unbelievable thousands. The Univer- 
 sity does not yet boast a Department of Music, 
 though one hears rumors of millions ripe to drop 
 at the summons of One Elect. If you feel the star 
 quite distinct above your brows, you might prac- 
 
 69 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 tice crooking your little finger with the proper 
 imperial persuasion. 
 
 You don't tell me anything about people. I 
 have become a frowsy gossip, and cannot live 
 without my pill of personalities sweetly com- 
 pounded. To punish you for the neglect I enclose 
 a reaction on a recent notable Experience. Hire 
 an amanuensis for seven hours and talk out a 
 sufficing bundle of pages on the mystical diff"er- 
 ences between This and That, and send the bill 
 along with the bundle. 
 
 Will. 
 
 P.S. Before reading my poor little reaction, 
 do me the justice to abstract yourself for twelve 
 
 hours from the society of , — to whom, by 
 
 the way, I send my warmest regards. I have 
 just enjoyed his article in the Chap Book. 
 
 The "reaction on a recent notable Experience" here 
 referred to was rejected by Moody when he came to 
 make up the "Poems" of 1901 — for what reason is 
 not very evident. Mrs. Moody says that he felt that 
 "The Golden Journey" made it superfluous. The 
 style of the two poems is doubtless somewhat similar, 
 but "Dawn Parley" has a simple directness and a 
 poignancy that the other lacks. At any rate there can 
 be no harm in reprinting it here as an excellent example 
 of its author's earlier manner. 
 
 70 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 DAWN PARLEY 
 
 I WOKE Upon the edge of day, 
 The east was wild with racing light, 
 All meek and wild my spirit lay 
 Star-shaken with delight. 
 
 I said, "This moment she doth wake 
 Within the chamber next but one, 
 She sees the morning-glory shake 
 Its trumpets to the sun." 
 
 A bird that had his headstrong say 
 Outside my casement, frilled and went; 
 All wild and wan my spirit lay 
 With sudden anguish rent. 
 
 For yesternight I laid my brain 
 And all my soul's dim banded powers 
 Open to her, who said, *"T is plain 
 Thy ways are none of ours." 
 
 "Though nobly good to thine and thee. 
 To us thy ways are strange and drear; 
 I go with my sweet friends to be. 
 And thou must tarry here." 
 71 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 Above the hurry of the light 
 All meek and wild my spirit hung, 
 From the far hills I scared the night 
 And in the zenith sung, 
 
 "O! playmates of her heedless hours, 
 Her eyes ye nevermore may see : 
 My brain and all my soul's dim powers 
 Possess her utterly." 
 
 W. V. M. 
 July i8, 1896. 
 
 To Mrs, C. H. Toy 
 
 [Chicago, August 11, 1896.] 
 As for Chicago, I find that it gives me days or 
 at least hours of broad-gauge Whitmanesque 
 enthusiasm, meagrely sprinkled over weeks of 
 tedium. The tedium is not of the acid-bath sort, 
 however. Genuinely, I feel mellower, deeper- 
 lunged, more of a lover of life, than I have ever 
 felt before, and the reason is that I have had long 
 somnolent spaces in which to feel the alchemy of 
 rest. I am writing, not much, but with time 
 enough to listen for the fairy echoes, to turn and 
 taste again, to fix and prefer. I shall never have a 
 lordly shelf-full of books to point to (''Paint my 
 
 72 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 two hundred pictures, some good son!") but if I 
 live out the reasonable span, I think I can hope 
 to have one little one at least, or two maybe, 
 v/hich will be in their own way vocal from cover to 
 cover. Whether the voice will be one that people 
 will care to hear, matters less to me than it did — 
 perhaps less than it should. Safely stowed in my 
 gum-cell, with my globule of amber honey, I find 
 it easy to forget Leviathan and his egregious 
 spou tings. He begins to seem the least bit comical, 
 Leviathan, from the gum-cell outlook. The fact 
 that we and our cell could hang unobserved on 
 one of his eyelashes, does n't negate our import- 
 ance in the least. . . . 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 Chicago, August i6, 1896. 
 Dear Rob: 
 
 The Morgenthau message was, as you with 
 characteristic charity surmise, of friendly import. 
 It is only natural that the terse impassioned 
 utterance of great minds under stress, should have 
 floored the telegraph operator. Hard luck that 
 your summer should have got away from you 
 with so little to show in the way of essentials — 
 
 73 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 by which I do not need to say I mean alluvial 
 soaks and happy drools, rather than land travel 
 and seafaring. 
 
 Chicago has been a woe and a bitterness this 
 summer. Both Ferd and I hate the shop and all it 
 contains with a physical hatred. We are looking 
 for the man who said the summer was cool and a 
 good time to work. . . . 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 [Chicago, 
 August 27, 1896.] 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 So far from considering your letter "merely 
 silly" I found it really stirring — at least after I 
 got over my amusement, which you must grant 
 to the weakness of the flesh. The chief reason why 
 I have not replied sooner is (prepare to be shocked 
 beyond speech) that I have been trying to make 
 up my mind which side has the least injustice and 
 unwisdom to its account in this matter. Living 
 here in the heart of the debtor's country I have 
 come to see that the present regime cannot possi- 
 bly endure. Free silver is undoubtedly a desper- 
 ate remedy — perhaps an insane one ; but the slow 
 asphyxiation which the vast farming population 
 
 74 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 of the West is undergoing from the appreciation 
 of deferred payments on their gigantic mortgage 
 debt, due to the inadequacy of the maximum 
 gold coinage to keep pace with the growth of 
 values — calls for immediate relief of some sort. 
 I have seriously thought, had indeed before you 
 wrote seriously thought, of doing a little stump- 
 ing during the fall vacation, but on which side my 
 voice and vote will fall is still a matter of debate 
 with me. This is the utmost abyss and downward 
 of my recreancy. 
 
 I envy you your feverish and on-the-whole 
 delightful visitings with a poisonous tin-green 
 envy. I have about got my mouth full of western 
 heartiness and uniplexity, and long for the lands 
 of purple haze and wicked goat-shanks of apo- 
 thegm footing it after the shy fluttered robes of 
 dryad metaphor. Abbott Thayer must be a daisy : 
 tell me about him. O to walk in a far 
 sweeter country, among dim many-colored 
 bushes! O now to drink a brown drop of happi- 
 ness with my good friend ! Selah ! 
 
 I note with grief the catalogue of black-prowed 
 ships the Gods have winged with disaster against 
 your spirit's Troy. Anxious counting will not 
 seem to make them fewer. I would urge you 
 
 75 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 again to brave the blustering rigors of the west, 
 if it did not seem such abandoned selfishness to do 
 so. For me to go East now would not only be to 
 "break a trace," but to break for a hasty feast the 
 little pot of honey I have stored up by much 
 noon-day toil to serve for a long long starveling 
 joy next summer and the winter after. I shall 
 only be able to pull through the winter on the 
 prospect of nine months of golden liberty at the 
 end — the epithet being, let me hasten to add, 
 notably metaphorical. 
 
 The Singer refuses to comfort my exile with so 
 much as a shed feather of song. My letters lie 
 unanswered and my tear-bottles cumber the 
 Dead-Letter Office. Wherefore are these thusly? 
 Ah me, to walk in a country of dim many-colored 
 bushes, beside bright-breathing waters! To hear 
 the shy bird that woke at evening in the breast 
 of my friend ! Selah. 
 
 I was glad to hear you liked the Atlantic article. 
 I am in a state of rawness and jealousy when praise 
 of even a pot-boiler makes me lick the hand of 
 the giver. Desperate is the pass of all little Gods 
 who say after the sixth day, ''This is my handi- 
 work, and lo, it is mostly Lolly-pop!" 
 
 Divinely yours, W. V. M. 
 
 76 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Josephine Preston Peahody 
 
 August 30 [1896?]. 
 
 Are n't you ever going to speak to me again? 
 Is my back-yard left irremediably desolate? Have 
 your rag dolls and your blue dishes said inexorable 
 adieu to my cellar-door? The once melodious 
 rain-barrel answers hollow and despairing to my 
 plaints — but for that the summer is mute. 
 What have I done? What have I left undone? 
 Alas, these questions are the ancient foolishness 
 of the Rejected. Forgive me that the rejected are 
 foolish, but tell me my sin. But a little while ago 
 you were my intercessor with one whom I had 
 inscrutably offended, and now you visit upon my 
 head inscrutable doom. Imagine the panic of a 
 spider who has anchored his web to the pillars of 
 the firmament and discovers of a sudden that they 
 are the spokes of a bicycle in active requisition. 
 Such a one so smote me yesterday with his alle- 
 gory that I plucked him, silky ruin and all, from 
 his fool's paradise, and deposited him among the 
 comfortable rafters. Will you be outdone in 
 charity? My web is a sight — and Messieurs the 
 flies, once my toothsome prey, beleaguer me, 
 buzzing annihilation. W. V. M. 
 
 77 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 Categorically, I crave answer to the following 
 questions : — 
 
 1. Where are you to be next year? 
 
 2. What are you going to do there? 
 
 3. Where have you been this summer? 
 
 4. What did you do there? 
 
 5. What are your latest opera? (a ms. copy of 
 same should accompany reply.) 
 
 6. What are your contemplated opera? (May 
 be omitted for cause.) 
 
 7. Are you happy? 
 
 8. Are you well? 
 
 9. Are you still friends? 
 
 N.B. Please answer the questions in the order 
 given. Use only plain idiomatic English. You 
 will be judged by both the quality and the quan- 
 tity of your writing. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Chicago, 
 November 24, 1896. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 So far from being able to " dartle a ray of poesy " 
 into your world, I contrast the vivid glow of that 
 world as set forth in your letter, with the kennel 
 I inhabit, in a spirit of blank misgiving. Fourteen 
 
 78 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 consecutive months of hack teaching^ have left 
 me in a state of spiritual beggary I never dreamed 
 of, and the seven months that still roll their 
 vermiform length before me sometimes startle me 
 into a Bedlam query. The uncourageous truth 
 must be told, that I have got already to the lees 
 of my resisting power, and at the best can only 
 crawl stricken and tolerated to the latter end. 
 The spirit of selection, the zest of appropriation, 
 is gone out of me. For a more instant misery, I 
 must give up my Christmas trip east, to which 
 my rheumy eyes have long been straining for 
 light. A new course to read for, and a pinching 
 poverty, are the main reagents in this stinking 
 bit of chemistry ; at the black bottom of the retort 
 lieth Little Willy's calcined pebble of a heart. 
 Sing a song of willow. Strew on him sawdust, 
 sawdust, with never a hint of goo. Convey a poor 
 devil's plangent gratitude to your mother and 
 your sister-in-law for their offered hospitality. 
 This reminds me — how did Mrs. Milton Mason 
 get it into her head that she had offended me? 
 Let her know that in my present state, perhaps 
 in any state, a snub or a cufifing from her likes 
 would be unto me as rarest hydromel, since after 
 
 ^ That is, since October, 1895. 
 
 79 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 all even a snub or a cuffing constitutes a sort of 
 bond. The blue beatitude of those Milton hills 
 often yearns into the grey drift over Chicago 
 roofs, and I hear thence, even in the midst of 
 cable-car-gongs and elevator chains, a spectral 
 hymnody. . . . 
 
 Your statement of your musical condition fills 
 me with sorrow and wrath. Your letter reached 
 me just as I was starting for the Friday afternoon 
 Symphony rehearsal, and darkened for me this 
 one flower of passion and color that still blooms 
 where the city of my soul once was. But in the 
 midst of a Schumann thing my eye wandered to 
 the program and read there the story of his being 
 turned by just such a misfortune as yours into the 
 work which was so gloriously his to do. Of course 
 you know the story, but I could hardly help 
 sitting down at once and calling upon you, be- 
 seeching you to think of it again. For you to give 
 up music for "letters " is for an oyster to renounce 
 pearl-making in order to devote its energies to 
 the composition of sea-weed pills. I hasten to 
 add that this is n't saying a damn against the 
 pills. . . . 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 80 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Mary L. Mason 
 
 Chicago. 
 Jan. 14, 1897. 
 My dear Mrs. Mason, — 
 
 Believe me, I was not nearly so unheedful of 
 your Song of the Milton hills, as my silence has 
 seemed to say. The two or three days which I 
 spent at your house, with those hills for back- 
 ground, taught me their power of saying "Be still 
 and know.'* Those few days stand out with a 
 singular lustre — no, that is hardly the word — 
 with a quality, a timbre, which often surprises me 
 with its recurrence and residence. Please don't 
 suspect me of "registering sensations," but this 
 mysterious wilfulness of the memory in aggran- 
 dizing this experience and annulling that, out of 
 all reason and proportion so far as one can judge 
 from the outside, often sets me wondering who is 
 boss of me, anyhow. Whoever he is, in this par- 
 ticular instance I submit cheerfully to his dictum. 
 
 As Dan may have told you I have been liv- 
 ing a rather shrouded existence of late, owing to 
 many circumstances which are hardly worth 
 retailing one by one, but which in the mass make 
 up a very respectable incubus. My term of dur- 
 
 81 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 ance in the academic stocks, however, has been 
 sensibly shortened: I expect to get on to Boston 
 before the end of April, to meet some of God's 
 people once more before setting out for God's 
 country. Is n't it singular that really good humans 
 all seem like emigres, trying bravely but rather 
 forlornly to persuade themselves that the land of 
 their adoption is the land of Heart's Desire? By 
 which sapient query you can gauge the state of 
 my nervous reservoirs: a whining sentimentality 
 such as that can only be excused or accounted for 
 by the nigh yawning of the ineloquent tomb. 
 
 I will not try to thank you for your multiplied 
 kindnesses, of which your letter was not the least. 
 Always earnestly yours, 
 
 William Vaughn Moody. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 [Chicago, 
 Feb. 23, 1897.] 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 Your letter arouses my conscience from the 
 daze into which I some months ago drugged and 
 sand-bagged it in order that it might not interfere 
 with the performance of meaner but more press- 
 ing duties than the ones it clamored of. I have 
 
 82 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 treated my friends shamefully, though every day 
 I see more clearly that they are the principal 
 thing, and that without them, or at least without 
 the sense of them in the background, life would 
 be but, as we are informed on good authority it is, 
 a Vale of Tears. I have been rather ashamed to 
 write for one thing, for fear of revealing my 
 barrenness, but if one hath only a clout to his 
 breech should he therefore hide him forever in a 
 dog-hutch ? Thus spake Zarathustra. This quarter 
 I have been held down to business with particular 
 attentiveness on the part of the divine chastener 
 of my spirit : besides my theme work I have been 
 giving a course in the seventeenth century poets, 
 reading in them all night and writing lectures on 
 them all day. Good fun, and I have made some 
 rare finds — of which expect to hear more anon — 
 but rather hard on one's tire. I hasten to assure 
 you that I am as yet unpunctured, though much 
 worn at the rim, and rapidly losing resiliency 
 through leakage. I relinquish the figure with 
 reluctance. . . . 
 
 I can't tell yet whether I shall get on to Boston 
 before sailing. I fear not, as I can get very cheap 
 rates east on the Baltimore and Ohio, and my 
 steamer (Anchor Line to Naples) is apt to up and 
 
 83 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 sail any old day after I get away from here, thus 
 making the extra trip to Boston a very hurried 
 one at best. Moreover, in my present tan-bark 
 state of soul I should be as dull to you as I am to 
 myself. In any case I shall stop for a week or ten 
 days on my return in the fall, when I shall be 
 trailing clouds of glory of the most diapered 
 design, and when, moreover, the tennis will be 
 ripe enough to pull, to say nothing of country 
 walks and things. 
 
 To Josephine Preston Peabody 
 
 Harvard Club, 27 West 44th St. 
 March 26, 1897. 
 My dear Friend: 
 
 Now that I have at last emerged from darkness 
 a riveder le stelle, I turn to you as Dante to Casella, 
 and beg at least a word to prove that Florence 
 still has true hearts. I am still rather numb as to 
 brain and drab-colored as to soul, but I can feel 
 the holy influences that wait upon him who loafs 
 beginning to purge me and urge me, though I 
 tremble to say so for fear of frightening back 
 their shy inquiring tentacles. The thought of six 
 whole months of acquaintance with myself fills 
 
 84 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 me with an inexpressible arrogance, the likes of 
 which I did n't suspect my meek pedagogical 
 make-up of. I had promised myself for a long 
 time a few days tarry in Boston before sailing, 
 but got caught as usual between the contracting 
 prongs of time and space. So, instead of the long 
 afternoon or afternoons during which I had hoped 
 to rummage the past and peer into the future 
 with you, here I am with a half -hour and a sheet 
 of paper. Nevertheless, that will suffice for the 
 cardinal question — How is it with you? What is 
 the news from the Niche? Won*t you tell me, 
 through the medium of Messrs. Whitby and Co., 
 5 Via Tornabuoni, Florence? 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 During the six months' trip to Italy and the Austrian 
 Tyrol that Moody now made, he wrote ''Good Friday 
 Night" and the "Road Hymn for the Start," and 
 began work on the "Masque of Judgment." He 
 returned to Chicago in September, 1897, and under- 
 took, in addition to his teaching, at the suggestion of 
 Mr. Horace E. Scudder, whom he refers to as "Uncle 
 Horace," the editing of the Cambridge Edition of 
 Milton's Poetical Works. 
 
 85 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Ferdinand Schevill 
 
 Casa Frollo, Giudecca. 
 Venice, June 8th, '97. 
 Dear Ferd: 
 
 I have put off writing to you from day to day, 
 partly by reason of the manifold demands which 
 Venice makes on one's powers of sensation and 
 utterance, but principally by reason of the delay 
 which my intimate connections with the patrician 
 houses of Milan failed to prevent in the forward- 
 ing of my negatives. Here they are at last, such 
 ones as I have got printed: rejoice over them 
 duly. 
 
 I have been installed in the Casa Frollo with 
 the Lovett family for two weeks, and many 
 blessings have been showered upon us. Foremost 
 to be mentioned among Heaven's gifts is a gar- 
 den, green and voiceful, reaching back through 
 checkered vistas to the Lagoon — a regularly 
 bang-up place of dalliance. Lacketh as yet a 
 laughing Lalage; as yet, I repeat, not without a 
 sinking at the heart. Meanwhile Euterpe floats 
 at the ends of the vineyard alleys, elusive, promis- 
 ing. The Good-Friday theme has taken shape; 
 
 86 
 
nil I 
 
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Ins 
 
 ^1 
 
 ^ 
 k 
 
 ^ 
 
 1-- 
 
 i 
 
 li 
 
 ^5 
 
 
 F-1 
 
 r. 
 
 ^1 ^ 
 
 K 
 
 N 
 
 1 
 
 ■C^ 
 
 r 
 
 ^ 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 it proved more modest in scope in the working 
 out than I had anticipated, but I am almost satis- 
 fied with it nevertheless. I hope you may not 
 frown upon it, when in the fullness of time it is 
 chanted before you. I am at work now on a 
 rather hopelessly fantastic thing, I fear, half- 
 lyric, half-dramatic; I shall try to excuse the wil- 
 fulness of the form by calling it a Masque. The 
 subject is the Judgment-day — no less — a kind 
 of sketchy modern working over of the theme, 
 from the point of view of the accusing human. 
 God Almighty promises to be an engaging figure, 
 with proper foreshortening. The protagonist is 
 the archangel Raphael, a staunch humanist (his 
 enemies — Heaven confound their counsels! — 
 would say a sentimentalist), and principal roles 
 are sustained by such pleasing characters as the 
 Seventh Lamp of the Throne, the Angel of the 
 Pale Horse, the Lion of the Throne, and the 
 Spirit of the Morning-star. I foresee great possi- 
 bilities, — a kind of Hebrew Gotterdammerung, 
 with a chance for some real speaking-out-in- 
 meeting — hoop-la! — Excuse my barbaric yawp; 
 it is merely meant to express enthusiasm. 
 
 We keep a gondola-slave, and make frequent 
 trips to the Lido, which however is dull as yet. 
 
 87 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 The weather grows hot and heavy apace ; I fear 
 we shall have to make a break for the mountains 
 before long. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Josephine Preston Peahody 
 
 Cortina d'Ampezzo, 
 Tyrol, July 15, 1897. 
 
 My dear Miss Josephine Preston Peabody: 
 I have not answered your unfriendly and inade- 
 quate letter sooner because I found myself incap- 
 able of mustering the amount of ill-feeling which 
 I judged commensurate with the demands of a 
 reply. I have, indeed, given up all hope of such 
 a strenuous accession, and have resolved merely 
 to hide the fountains of my good will under a 
 decent covering of recrimination, throwing my 
 human longing for retaliation to the winds. I am 
 the more moved to measures of pacification be- 
 cause, in the first place, my return to New England 
 shores has grown suddenly more imminent, and 
 in the second, because I hear news of noble Works 
 taking shape and soul under your hands. It is now 
 nearly three weeks since I fled here to this sky- 
 hung, cloud-acquainted village of the Austrian 
 
 88 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 Tyrol from the too generous ardors of an Italian 
 summer. I am moved to harrow your literary 
 sensibilities with ''description" of these wind- 
 swept valley pastures, hedged in by ferocious 
 peaks, and dowered, even to the border of the 
 snow, with unimaginable wealth of wild bloom. 
 Tremble not, I will not maltreat a captive of 
 courtesy. To tell the ignoble truth, as my time of 
 liberty draws to an end, and I see how very little 
 I have accomplished in it, I find myself trying 
 to shut out sensations which are too poignant and 
 crowding, in order that I may find the restfulness 
 necessary for work. I have arrived at a depth of 
 miserliness where it is possible for me to give up 
 a night in the star-lit grass for a night of lamp-oil 
 and muddy ink. Not that I have done much, or 
 shall, I fear; but I have a good thing to do, when 
 it pleases Apollo. I have just had a letter from 
 Uncle Horace, making propositions — messes of 
 pottage: it is the reek and fatness thereof which 
 draws my Esau-soul homeward before its ap- 
 pointed time — perhaps. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 Address, care Whitby and Co. 
 5 Via Tornabuoni, Florence. 
 
 89 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Albergo d'Espagna, Via Calzaioli, 
 Florence, August i, 1897. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 When I found in the batch of letters awaiting 
 me here this morning one from you, remorse, long 
 dozing, awoke and gnawed. I have been a monster 
 of taciturnity and greedy possession; I have lain 
 on my gorgeous heap of sensation like Fafnir on 
 the Glittering Hoard, growling from my papier- 
 machS throat to all importunate duties and memo- 
 ries, "Lass mich fiihlen! Ich lieg und besitze." 
 As I count over my rosary of Italian days — and 
 nights ! — with the little seed pearls and the 
 pearls of price and the green gawdies, a sense of 
 profound pity for everybody else in the world 
 invades my breast, — now at least when the 
 imminent prospect of a return to the key of drab 
 sends over me a sense of moral realities once more. 
 The substance of your letter as well as its tone 
 precipitates this floating compassion about your- 
 self, a reaction of the spiritual chemistry for 
 which you will doubtless thank me as little as I 
 should you in a reversed case. That your arm 
 
 does not pick up, that 's beard has again been 
 
 90 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 known to stick out straight, that laughs a 
 
 hyena laugh before relapsing into ambrosial 
 silence, to say nothing of your estrangement from 
 the mint julep and its realms of gold — all to- 
 gether constitute a desolating picture — so deso- 
 lating indeed that I hesitate to communicate a 
 plan I had formed for spending the month of 
 September in Boston. The only scrap of comfort 
 I get, fortunately an intensive one, is the paren- 
 thetical assurance that you spend the hoarded 
 strength of your arm in writing music. I have 
 never quite got over the shock given me by your 
 announcement six months ago that music was 
 not for you. There seemed something obscene 
 about such a blow to your chance of happiness, 
 such a lopping off. I remember once seeing a play- 
 mate coming out of his door on crutches after he 
 had lost a foot. Bah! my soul sickens yet, after 
 fifteen years. These things should not be done 
 after these ways. My golden bath, my Semele- 
 shower of sensation, has only strengthened my 
 conviction that the adventures of the mind are 
 beyond all compare more enthralling than the 
 adventures of the senses, that no twining of 
 amorous limbs can bring the intoxication of the 
 airy grappling of the Will to Beauty with the 
 
 91 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 feminine latency of thought toward being beauti- 
 fully created upon. I hope that is not as snarled 
 as it looks on paper, though I know it's full as 
 bawdy. 
 
 This conviction is perhaps the best thing I have 
 to show for my vacation, however. I observe 
 with sudden retrospective dismay that I have 
 accomplished next to nothing in printable pages, 
 one or two short poems, and a couple of torsoes 
 sketched out in the block, but so big that my 
 mallet and chisel lose themselves in the inter- 
 stices between dust speck and dust speck. I 
 clamber with Liliputian ingenuity over the bulk 
 thereof, spying out, very agile and bustling, with 
 horny eye apprehensive upon cracks and preci- 
 pices. As yet no planet-displacing news. 
 
 Remains to be communicated my plan for Sep- 
 tember : this : Uncle Horace has had the gentilezza 
 to offer me a substantial job of book-editing, 
 which if I accomplish in due season will insure me 
 another playing-space months earlier than I could 
 otherwise hope for it. I propose accordingly to 
 cut short off here, sail on the 19th August for 
 America, reach Boston by the first of September, 
 and spend the ensuing four weeks working in the 
 Boston and Cambridge libraries, with seasons of 
 
 92 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 torso-climbing and mint-juleping generously in- 
 terspersed 
 Till when — 
 
 Will. 
 
 P.S. When you write abroad again use tissue- 
 paper and invisible ink and write on both sides. 
 My disbursements to the Italian government and 
 the Postal Union on your blue-book amounted to 
 just eighty-five (85) centesimi. Not that it was n't 
 worth ninety (90), but thrift is thrift. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 5488 East End Avenue, 
 Chicago. 
 [January 3, 1898.] 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 My gratitude for your stout refusal to forget 
 my existence at last forces me to open my lips in 
 some galvanic sign of sentience. Having got them 
 unlocked I can do little more than let them gape, 
 for I have quite lost the use and want of speech — 
 at least civilized speech. I have mastered the 
 local symbols of communication and can now 
 carry on conversation of some length with the 
 
 93 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 native population, but it has been at the ex- 
 pense of my English. I counted my vocabu- 
 lary last night and discovered it to consist of 
 ninety -three words. You shall have them all, 
 if you will promise not to be reckless with 
 them. 
 
 ... I am unable at present to express my emo- 
 tion over your propaganda of my fame, in a more 
 robust way than by enclosing the Good Friday 
 Night. Jetsam I have n't a decent copy of, nor 
 time to make one. I started in today on another 
 quarter's work at the shop — with vacation and 
 restored consciousness three months away. From 
 now until April I shall not have time to say a 
 Credo ; but when the spring is in the air you may 
 look for me to drop down on you out of the first 
 blue sky. ... Of "spiritual encounters" I have 
 had — am having — one; but it is too solemn to 
 talk about, short of midnight and the third glass 
 — if then. . . . This is a sneaking poor return 
 for your good letters, but I am dead tired and 
 tomorrow is wash-day. 
 
 Will. 
 
 94 
 
iWILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Josephine Preston Peabody 
 
 Chicago.' 
 Jan. 5, 1898. 
 
 I have just been telling Dan that the alms of 
 remembrance which my Cambridge friends (the 
 term is inclusive) still bestow at feast-time upon 
 me, are taken with no less gratitude because the 
 lockjaw which prevents me from nourishing my 
 leanness with them also somewhat impedes my 
 speech. As for the new year you point a hortatory 
 finger at — speriamo I April is only eighty-eight 
 lectures, forty committee meetings and several 
 thousand themes away, and then I shall be for a 
 little time my own man again, with a chance to 
 look about and say "Well!" Whether it is to be 
 an expletive rather than a considering adverb, 
 the gods and several little people have on their 
 knees. . . . 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 5488 East End Ave., 
 Chicago, Feb. 21, 1898. 
 Dear Rob: 
 
 Your letter and the pictures bring home to me 
 my epistolary shortcomings with a painful dis- 
 
 95 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 tinctness. I blush with shame when I reflect that 
 a scribbled postcard from Viareggio, which you 
 probably never got, is the only sign of remem- 
 brance and gratitude I have made since our good 
 times at Cortina and thereabouts. But to my 
 heart my heart was voluble. 
 
 Thanks for the pictures; they fall cool and 
 lovely on an eye grown horny with animadversive 
 gazing upon Chicago art and nature. I find to my 
 considerable depression that Chicago does not 
 subdue me to her graces any more masterfully 
 than she did two years ago. Indeed, these last 
 six months have made me almost as fanatically 
 homesick for civilization as my former seven 
 quarters succeeded in doing. I lay it, stoutly, 
 to a higher organization of the sensorium, but I 
 inwardly suspect that it is owing to a depleted 
 sand. In either case, release is at hand; I leave in 
 less than a month for New York. I should have 
 let you know ere this that Spain is out of the 
 question for me this year. In the first place I 
 have n't the cash, in the second, my Milton is 
 not yet completed, and in the third, the climac- 
 teric, I want to get a little volume of verse ready 
 for press before fall at latest. The Masque, of 
 which you make friendly inquiry, is so far as 
 
 96 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 concretions go, much where Cortina left it ; but I 
 have thought about it a good deal, and believe I 
 can jam it through, with a little leisure. Why do 
 you treat the novel with such novercal rigor? By 
 all means put it out, before you come back and 
 assume all the stifling dignities that await you. 
 
 Remember me to Stickney. I read some of his 
 mss. the other day, sent me by Savage. He has 
 certainly strengthened much, but does n't seem 
 to have quite achieved yet the synthesis of Brown- 
 ing with Verlaine, at which he manifestly aims. 
 
 With warmest regards for Ida and the Bambini 
 (O egregious plural!) and felicitations upon your 
 own patriarchal head, and sorrowings of spirit 
 over lost Andalusia, 
 
 As ever. Will. 
 
 The following letter is undated, but as Mrs. Marks 
 published her first book, ''The, Wayfarers," in 1898, 
 it may from the internal evidence be assigned to the 
 early months of that year. 
 
 To Josephine Preston Peahody 
 
 Thanks for the good tidings; they have shed 
 about me a reflected glow of spiritual hien-etre rare 
 enough in the procession of my days to be relished, 
 
 97 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 I tell you. Then it was n't all reflected either, nor 
 will it altogether go with the fading of the ink. 
 It is jolly that some of us are going to have a 
 say; the elected one must be spokesman for the 
 rejected, and say it with an air and a gesture! 
 Not without responsibility, in view of the others, 
 listening glad but a little jealous, hoping to hear 
 it put just their way, and ready to lift protesting 
 hands if it is n't. I could swallow my own little 
 hiccough of envy with a better grace if I were 
 there to dogmatize over title and title-page, order 
 and grouping and pruning and padding. I sup- 
 pose you will have to struggle along your unillu- 
 mined way without me, poor thing; but there will 
 come a day of reckoning for all shortcomings, 
 when I crawl over your pages, horny eye animad- 
 versive upon this and that, antennae excitedly 
 waving. And if all is good and seemly without 
 and within, I shall go away mollified, and there 
 shall be no more drudging that day but only joy, 
 in the kingdom of Ants. 
 
 The jewelled white of the New England winter ! 
 Here it is mud — sky, lake, boulevard, factory, 
 flat, one featureless contiguity of Mud — to say 
 nothing of People and their Insides. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 98 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Chicago, 
 March 13, 1898. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 . . . Thanks for Dunn's poem: I found it 
 delightfully rapt and Keatsian: its vagueness is 
 not annoying, for it is the vagueness of youth. 
 (I wish you could see a picture I have over my 
 desk at this moment — an Antonelli da Messina 
 — a boy's face full of mystical yearning, set in a 
 background of dim trees.) Apropos of verses, the 
 Atlantic has taken my Good Friday Night. The 
 Bard [Miss Peabody] tells me, with ** valorous" 
 tears, that Copeland refuses to put out her book 
 before fall, which I suppose is preliminary to the 
 crawl direct. Sunt lachrymae rerum. 
 
 About April I, Moody arrived in New York and took 
 a room at 109 Waverley Place. He was working hard 
 on his edition of Milton, but also found time to write 
 out the "Masque of Judgment" in somewhat tentative 
 and fragmentary form. This he read to me in Boston, 
 early in June. He returned to Chicago for the summer 
 and autumn quarters' teaching, spent the Christmas 
 holidays in Boston, and in the first days of 1899 estab- 
 
 99 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 lished himself in New York again, this time at 318 
 West 57th St. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 ''The Players." 
 New York, April 8, 1898. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 . . . The plan you outline for the Easter vaca- 
 tion is so tempting that if you had sprung it on 
 me soon enough I suppose I should have yielded 
 to your blandishments and given New York the 
 go-by. Once here, however, I feel that I ought to 
 stay. If I mistake not, my lines are apt to be cast 
 in these places permanently in the not distant 
 future, and I have a good chance now to make 
 some acquaintances and learn the ropes of New 
 York life against that desirable time. I have 
 already met a number of capital chaps here at the 
 Players, where Carpenter has kindly set me down 
 — chiefly playwrights, not very big ones I suspect, 
 but full of enthusiasm and practical expedient. 
 The great thing about them is that they get their 
 things played, and that sort of thing, begad, 
 begins to appeal to me. Do not believe me quite 
 recreant to ideals ; Cambridge and her elegiac air 
 seems still lovely and of good report. But these 
 
 100 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 chaps here, though very moderately elegiac and 
 of a dubious report, are splendidly American and 
 contemporary ; and I feel convinced that this is the 
 place for young Americans who want to do some- 
 thing. (N.B. I have not enlisted in the marine,) 
 
 ... As for yourself, go to Chocorua by all 
 means, and believe me with you in wistful imagin- 
 ation when the spring sun gilds your mountain 
 tops and absorbs the spare goo from my asphalt 
 pavements. 
 
 As ever 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 The Players. 
 April 13, 1898. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 . . . Thanks for the addresses : I shall certainly 
 look up Harry. If you know any other good 
 people here, send me their names and where- 
 abouts and a card of introduction. I am going in 
 for people now, having made the discovery that 
 the average man is among the most unexpected 
 and absorbing of beings. . . . 
 
 lOI 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 [To Ferdinand SchevilL] 
 
 The Players. 
 
 1 6 Gramercy Park. 
 Easter Sunday — '98. 
 Dear Ferd: 
 
 I was sorry not to see you to say goodbye, 
 though the weeks that intervene between now 
 and July ist, when the summoning hour calls me 
 to penance, are already shortening so visibly that 
 the ceremony of leave-taking seems superfluous. 
 New York I find all I fondly imagined, and more. 
 The fellows I have met here are immensely cor- 
 dial ; they have set me down at two or three inter- 
 esting clubs where I am gradually getting an 
 insight into this wonderfully virile and variegated 
 life. Here at the Players especiall}' there are no 
 end of beguiling humans. Most of them are only 
 moderately elegiac, to be sure, and their allegiance 
 to the sisters of the sacred well is tempered by 
 their interest in the genie of the box-office till; 
 but they are splendidly American and contempo- 
 rary, and some of them are doing good work. I 
 dined last night with the man who did Tess over, 
 and the air of getting things jammed through 
 which pervaded him is pleasantly characteristic 
 
 102 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 of the whole crowd. Whatever the young Ameri- 
 can art-producer is, as I see him here in his 
 essence, he is certainly not lily-Hvered. The gen- 
 eraHzation is inspiriting. 
 
 Milton is stalking along with his usual austerity 
 toward completing himself, and besides I get a 
 little time for better things. . . . 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Chicago, Dec. 2, 1898. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 This is an attempt to forestall your righteous 
 wrath at my ungentlemanly neglect of your let- 
 ters, which have been meat and drink to me at the 
 seasons of their arrival and for long after. I will 
 accept any punishment except a refusal on your 
 part to rejoice over the fact that I am coming 
 to Cambridge for Christmas week. Intend thy 
 thoughts towards revelry, for there must be mad 
 times. Like a sick and lonesome gilligalloo bird 
 I begin to think on me native sugar-cane swamps, 
 and plume me feathers for a flight thither where 
 the carnivoristicous Philistine invadeth not with 
 his pot-gun of Important Business, and neither 
 moth nor dust doth corrupt. Don't tell me you 
 
 103 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 aint going to be to home, for I 'm acalculatin' on 
 you for my main holt. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Mrs. C. H. Toy 
 
 Chicago, Dec. 5, 1898. 
 My dear Mrs. Toy: 
 
 This is to say that I expect to spend Christmas 
 week in Cambridge. ... I am eager for the queer 
 inimitable charm of Cambridge, for that atmos- 
 phere of mind at once so impersonal and so warm, 
 for that neatness and decency of you children who 
 have been washed and dressed and sent to play 
 on the front lawn of time by old auntie Ding-an- 
 Sich, while we hoodlums contend with the goat 
 for tomato cans in the alley. I have a fair line of 
 the same to lay before your eyes when I am admit- 
 ted inside the aristocratic front gate : some of them 
 will make a fine effect in a ring around your 
 geranium bed. 
 
 . To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 [CmcAGO, Dec. 19, 1898.] 
 
 1. Arrive Friday p.m. or Saturday a.m. Exact 
 time to be communicated later. 
 
 2. Will stay at 39 with pleasure. 
 
 104 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 3. Think Chocorua too risky, especially for 
 your purposes of recuperation. 
 
 4. You shall loaf, sir. 
 
 5. You shall go to themes once more on Jan. 2 
 in a galliard, and conduct consultations in a 
 coranto. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Josephine Preston Peabody 
 
 318 West 57th St. 
 New York, Jan. 8, 1899. 
 My dear Friend: 
 
 I put off writing Hail and Godspeed when the 
 Book came out because I wanted to speak my 
 words of pride and praise in person. You were 
 not there to hear them, and since then I have 
 been caught in the wheels of this world's business. 
 But you cannot but believe me when I say that 
 the book gave me a very keen delight, first 
 because it was yours and second because it was 
 the world's, and read in cold type it entirely jus- 
 tified my old enthusiasm. Some things, which 
 seemed to me less mature and less forthright, I 
 could have wished away ; and others I could have 
 wished a little nearer the every day speech: but 
 even for these the Envoi made amende honorable, 
 
 105 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 What we expect of you now is to fulfill the pro- 
 mise there made: to take hold of the common 
 experience and the common idiom and glorify it. 
 Who am I, to be sure, that I should be offering 
 sage advice? Yet I hope you ask the question 
 without sarcasm, for after all I am one who has 
 loved the Muses well, and hoped much from my 
 friends, however I may seem to have forgotten 
 both the one and the other. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Harvard Club. 
 27 West 44th St. 
 Jan. 17, 1899. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 I certainly sha'n't let you off, now that you have 
 been rash enough to make advances. 'F yez don* 
 wan' the pants, w'y in hell 'd you try 'em on fur, 
 blokey? I answer your questions categorically. 
 
 I. You can see all of me all of the time after 
 and including lunch, which I usually take about 
 1.30; from the mysteries of my bath, breakfast, 
 and matutinal galumphing o'er twin-peaked 
 Parnassus, I shall exclude you peremptorily, but 
 after 1.30 I am yours till cock-crow. 
 
 106 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 2. My luncheon, consisting of a sandwich and 
 a drink, usually costs ten (lo) cents, unless I fre- 
 quent a free-lunch counter, when it costs five (5). 
 Since looking at the expanse of cheek in the pic- 
 ture which you send (and for which I thank you 
 kindly) I have about resolved to intermit lunches 
 for the time being. If this sounds too Spartan, 
 remember that a great deal of Nourishment can 
 be bought between Washington Square and Cen- 
 tral Park, if you still feel atrophied after lunching 
 with me. For dinner I pay (including tip) from 
 sixty to eighty-five cents, except on rare occasions 
 when I feel proud and sassy — on which occasions 
 I sometimes reach the dizzy and disastrous peak of 
 a dollar ten. 
 
 3. The weather will be fine. Shut up, I say it 
 will! 
 
 I have n't touched the Masque,^ but have 
 plunged in medias res with the play.^ It bids fair 
 to be short (perhaps 50 minutes to an hour to act) 
 but it's developing pretty well. I found myself 
 embarrassed a good deal at first by the dull 
 monochromatic medium of everyday speech, but 
 
 ^ That is, since making the first draft the preceding spring. 
 2 The first draft of what eventually became "The Faith 
 Healer." 
 
 107 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 am getting more used to it now and find that when 
 you do get an effect in it it is more flooring than 
 anything to be got with bright pigments. I am 
 trying hard to give it scenic structure, for as I 
 conceive it nearly half of it will be dumb show; 
 at least a great deal of its effectiveness will depend 
 on the acting. I shall have it ready to read to you 
 — at least in first draft — when you appear. I 've 
 got a Chinese restaurant to show you on Mott 
 Street; likewise a Chinese stew that will make 
 your gizzard turn pale with joy. Refusing to be 
 refused, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 [New York, Jan. 31, 1899.] 
 [Postal card.] 
 Are you going to take those pants? It is 
 important for me to know, as there are other 
 customers. If a hasty decision (or the necessity 
 of it) will prejudice the possibility of your coming, 
 however, put it off until the ninth hour. You*d 
 better come. Verbum sapienti. Pictures — - music 
 — theatre — dives — dinners — Broadway — 
 Bowery — beer — girls — galoots — grippe — [the 
 
 108 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 last word is stricken out] Heaven forefend ! I Ve 
 just come out of it. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Ferdinand Schevill 
 
 The Players. 
 1 6 Gramercy Park. 
 New York, Feb. 20, 1899. 
 Dear Ferd: 
 
 The great king Grippe reigns in Babylon, and 
 his hand has been heavy on all his subjects — 
 especially yours afflictedly. . . . 
 
 Are you still minded to woo the Muse under 
 these skies in spring? There may be better places, 
 but there surely are worse; and if the Muse 
 though never so strictly meditated prove thank- 
 less, there yet remain Amaryllis and the tangles 
 of Neaera's hair. The latter is usually a wig, but 
 very nicely tangled and adequate for most pur- 
 poses of distraction. 
 
 • •••••• 
 
 Will. 
 Address, 318 West 57th St. 
 
 109 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Atlantic Transport Line, S. S. Mesaba. 
 New York, March ii. [1899.] 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 This is only a word to say that I have been 
 unable to resist the very low rates of passage 
 brought about by the rate- war between the trans- 
 atlantic lines, and am off for England. ... I 
 shall settle down and work steadily. . . . 
 
 Hastily, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Ferdinand Schevill 
 
 36 Guilford St., W. C. 
 London, April 21. [1899.] 
 Dear Ferd: 
 
 I have been away from London, hunting for 
 the wisdom of the thrush, so that your letter 
 reaches me late. I hasten to assure you that you 
 need n't be afraid of missing April's careless rap- 
 ture; it's warranted not to be subject to draft 
 this year before May. We have had next to no 
 spring as yet, and if you girded up your pajamas 
 and came across next month you would get both 
 
 no 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 overture and tuning-up. Seriously, why can't 
 you? Fares are so low that it's cheaper to come 
 than stay, and we could have some rememberable 
 hours: the country promises to be ravishing in a 
 week or two more, and is already good. Walking 
 from Wraysbury to Horton yesterday (a distance 
 of 2^ miles across the fields) I counted eleven sky- 
 larks, all soaring and singing fit to break your 
 heart. . . . 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 London, May 13, 1899. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 . . . The Masque is done, all but the finishing 
 touches and one song which wont get itself written 
 straight. I have one or two small projects on 
 hand to the pursuit of which I intend to devote 
 this next month. . . . 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 31 Graduate Hall, 
 Chicago, July 5, '99. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 If I had written to you as often as I have 
 thought of you, especially since I heard of poor 
 
 III 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 Savage*s death, ^ you would have had no cause to 
 complain. The news came to me on the boat, and 
 came with a strange solemnity there in the middle 
 of the ocean. I do not know of anybody who could 
 go beyond time — that ''thing how slight!" ^ — 
 with better hopes of contentment there. It must 
 have been almost at the very hour of his death 
 that Joe Stickney ^ and I sat talking of him in the 
 twilight of a Paris spring afternoon, and reading 
 some of his lines with certain hopes of the larger 
 though surely no sweeter or purer work he was to 
 do some day. I do not know why the death of a 
 spiritual man, at least one who dies in youth, is so 
 much more moving than that of another. One 
 would expect it to be the contrary way : perhaps 
 it is to the true understanding. Well, he has left 
 
 1 Philip Henry Savage (1868-1899), a contemporary of 
 Moody's at Harvard, who wrote poetry of remarkable delicacy 
 and distinction. 
 
 2 "Brother, Time is a thing how slight! 
 Day lifts and falls, and it is night. 
 Rome stands an hour, and the green leaf 
 Buds into being bright and brief. 
 For us, God has at least in store 
 One shining moment, less or more. 
 Seize, then, what mellow sun we may, 
 To light us in the darker day." 
 " Poems" of Philip Henry Savage. Small, Maynard & Co., 1901. 
 ' Joseph Trumbull Stickney (i 874-1 904), another Harvard 
 poet, whose poems Moody and others edited after his early death. 
 
 112 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 behind a half-dozen lyrics that will last as long as 
 the nation, or longer. Let us be content with that, 
 as he doubtless was. 
 
 I have no time now, in the rush of the opening 
 quarter, to tell you about myself, except to say 
 that I heeded your admonition and ''dropped a 
 book" as I came through New York.^ Macmillan 
 is reading it. I have n't much confidence that the 
 poor little volume will ever see the light under 
 such august patronage, but somebody or other 
 will be found with an eye to the thanks of pos- 
 terity and a proud contempt for the contemporary 
 dollar, I hope. I shall know its present fate in a 
 few weeks and will let you know promptly. 
 
 As for the Milton, it has I believe been out 
 several weeks or months, though I have not yet 
 seen a copy. If you want to learn what the New 
 York Nation thinks of it, look in the columns of 
 that sheet for the latter part of April. It does not 
 leave enough of me to bury. I am told that other 
 critics (Literature, the Dial, etc.) have been more 
 plenteous in mercy, but I have n't had strength 
 to look, after the Nation man-handling. 
 
 1 This must have been the "Poems," eventually published in 
 190 1 by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
 
 113 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Mrs. C. H. Toy 
 
 Chicago, Sept. 25, 1899. 
 My dear Mrs. Toy: 
 
 If I were not socially irreclaimable I should have 
 told you long before this how when I got back to 
 London that home of depression and tedium did 
 its accustomed work upon me, and how in despair 
 I fled to the country, from whose absolute green- 
 ness and comparative sunshine not even you and 
 Miss Goodwin could tempt me. It strikes me 
 upon re-reading that sentence that I never 
 achieved such a climax in the course of my expres- 
 sive life before, the emphasis falling the more 
 thunderously because of the contrast in the un- 
 amiable life about me to those gay and friendly 
 Paris days. Especially that morning we spent in 
 rambling talk in the Luxembourg gardens often 
 comes back to me with a quite peculiar charm, for 
 which the decor is not wholly responsible, but 
 rather "the human heart by which we live." 
 
 I am looking forward with eagerness to Boston 
 and Cambridge this winter. The longer I live the 
 more grateful I feel for the good and tried friends 
 that I made there, and that have so generously 
 borne and foreborne. Earnestly yours, 
 
 William Vaughn Moody. 
 
 114 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 P.S. Do you know Landor's Imaginary Con- 
 versation in which a General Mavrocordato 
 figures? An ancestor of your man? 
 
 To Josephine Preston Peahody 
 
 The Quadrangle Club. 
 Chicago, September 30, '99. 
 Your generous praise makes me rather shame- 
 faced: you ought to keep it for something that 
 counts. At least other people ought: you would 
 find a bright ringing word, and the proportion of 
 things would be kept. As for me I am doing my 
 best to keep the proportion of things, in the midst 
 of no-standards and a dreary dingy fog-expanse 
 of darkened counsel. Bah ! here I am whining in 
 my third sentence, and the purpose of this note 
 was not to whine, but to thank you for heart 
 new-taken. I take the friendly words, (for I need 
 them cruelly) and forget the inadequate occasion 
 of them. I am looking forward with almost fever- 
 ish pleasure to the new year, when I shall be among 
 friendships which time, and absence, and half- 
 estrangement have only made to shine with a 
 more inward light; and when, so accompanied, I 
 can make shift to think and live a little. Do not 
 wait till then to say Welcome. W. V. M. 
 
 115 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 The Quadrangle Club. 
 Chicago, Nov. 27, 1899. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 ... I have been and still am driven with work, 
 so that when I get a half-hour's leisure I am too 
 done up to put one idea to another. But a good 
 time is coming, and right soon, thank God! I 
 shall be in Boston by the end of the Christmas 
 holidays — and then ho ! for talk and talk and 
 talk, wherein all arrears shall be cancelled. I am 
 on the verge of a good fortune that I hardly dare 
 write about, for fear the envious gods will snatch 
 it away. If they do not, I shall be yours not only 
 for this spring but also for the summer and a good 
 slice of next year. Will let you know at once when 
 the die is cast.^ . . . 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 The Quadrangle Club. 
 Chicago, Dec. 2nd, 1899. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 Your magnificence in paying down instantly 
 
 * He was enabled to take a considerable holiday from the uni- 
 versity by his receipts from the "History of English Literature" 
 
 116 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 and royally for my mangy little note compels me 
 to snatch another moment to make a part of it 
 clearer. The hint which I threw out as to the 
 possibility of getting a long "vacation" (you'll 
 see in a minute that it is n't to be altogether 
 vacant) means, to wit, that I am about to con- 
 clude negotiations with one of two rival firms who 
 are equally convinced of my transcendant abili- 
 ties, for a history of English literature for High 
 Schools. In one case I am to do the whole of it 
 and in the other half, and I incline to the latter 
 because of the natural jealousy I feel of my time 
 just now. The half of the job I can do, I think, 
 in the spare or slack time of a year, and have my 
 mornings pretty free for better things. It will 
 bring me in five hundred plunks on delivery and 
 if successful ought to constitute a source of per- 
 manent though small income. If these negotia- 
 tions turn out all right, and I get the percentage 
 of royalty for which I am stickling, I am going to 
 apply for as long a leave of absence as the authori- 
 ties will allow me, perhaps a year and a half, as I 
 think I can pull through that period on what I 
 have saved or can easily earn. The summer I am 
 
 on which he presently began work, in collaboration with Mr. 
 Lovett. 
 
 117 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 bound to have though the Heavens fall, or rather 
 because they are not going to fall but remain as a 
 fittingly modest framework to the spectacle of my 
 felicity. 
 
 Your conjecture about my work last spring 
 (with the implied reproof and warning) is partly 
 well-founded. Not wholly; for though London 
 oppressed me brutally I worked the Masque out 
 to twice its previous proportions, and most of the 
 new matter seems to bear the test of cold subse- 
 quent criticism. It is now four times as long as 
 when you saw it in fragment. There are, counting 
 re-writing and further development here and 
 there, about five hundred lines to be added, which 
 will leave it about the length of a substantial five- 
 act play — large enough to make a tidy volume by 
 itself, if I can implore or coerce any publisher into 
 printing it. With the Schlatter play ^ I have done 
 little more. It wont do as it is, and I don't see yet 
 how to go about resmelting it, though I still be- 
 lieve there is something in it worth saving. This 
 will be one of the tasks of the winter. My heart 
 leaps up when I behold, A calendar on the sly. I 
 don't trust myself to envisage the same with pre- 
 pense, for fear of danger to furniture and window 
 
 1 "The Faith Healer." 
 Ii8 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 glass. Have just heard from Robinson,^ who con- 
 veys some lyric gibberish of yours about apples 
 — if that 's the word, I can't make out his im- 
 moral fist with certainty. . . . 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 [Postmarked: Chicago, Dec. i8, 1899.] 
 Put it behind thee, my boy ; 't is a device of 
 Satan — a whisper of the Demon of Unrest and 
 Seller of Dead Sea Apples. For which belief I shall 
 soon furnish {viva voce) argument. The Muses, 
 I groundedly believe, reside at present on an 
 obscure peak (not yet visited) of New Hampshire 
 or Maine; that is, if they have not already suc- 
 cumbed to the attractions of Pike's Peak or 
 Mount Shasta. At any rate that's where I pur- 
 pose to seek them, and Europe be damned. I have 
 spoken. W. V. M. 
 
 Moody arrived in Boston at Christmas, and took a 
 room in the Hermitage, No. i Willow St. It was here 
 that, as I find recorded in my journal at the time, he 
 finally completed **The Masque of Judgment," Jan- 
 uary 25, 1900. The "Ode in Time of Hesitation" was 
 also written during this period, and appeared in the 
 
 1 Edwin Arlington Robinson, author of "Captain Craig," 
 "The Town Down the River," etc. 
 
 119 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 Atlantic Monthly for May. In the early spring he 
 established himself at East Gloucester, Massachu- 
 setts, where he wrote "Gloucester Moors" and the 
 "Menagerie," and revised the play dealing with 
 Schlatter, the "New Mexico Messiah," which he read 
 to a group of his friends at Falmouth, Mass., in July. 
 During part of the summer he lived with his friend Mr. 
 Truman H. Bartlett, in Chocorua, N. H. In October 
 he was again settled in Willow St., but in November 
 he went to New York, where he lived at 71 Irving 
 Place until his return to Chicago in January, 1901, 
 save for part of the Christmas holidays, spent with one 
 of his sisters in Newton, Massachusetts. 
 
 During all this period, a most important one in his 
 poetic development, he had to give a considerable por- 
 tion of his time to the text-book on English literature, 
 but managed to keep his mornings largely free for 
 creative work. The period is notable for publication 
 as well as for production: "The Masque of Judgment'* 
 was printed by Small, Maynard & Co. in November, 
 1900, and the " Poems" appeared in May, 1901, under 
 the imprint of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 I Willow St. 
 Boston, March 22, 1900. 
 Dear Rob: 
 
 I have just finished the early (Pre- Chaucerian) 
 portion of the greatest critical commentary of 
 
 120 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 modern times, and in view of my struggles there- 
 with your jaunty proposition to have your half 
 of the job done by midsummer, and teaching to 
 boot, fills me with envy. To be sure I had for- 
 gotten all my Anglo-Saxon and never knew any 
 Middle English, and had to grub like hell to get 
 at the stuff in some respectably first-hand way; 
 but that this chapter should have taken me six 
 solid weeks of my precious vacation breaks my 
 heart. 
 
 . ..\.. • • • • • • 
 
 As ever, 
 Will. 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 The Harbor View, East Gloucester, 
 April 6, [1900.] 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 I have put off writing you in order to give this 
 place a thorough test and report definitely upon it 
 as a vacation resort. I have liked it from the first 
 and like it better the longer I stay. The humors of 
 the harbor are many and its picturesqueness inex- 
 haustible. The moors, which stretch for several 
 miles to the eastward, are beautiful in color and 
 form, and the coast, although not rugged, is very 
 diversified. The house itself is as good a coun- 
 
 121 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 try inn as I ever saw. . . . There are a good 
 many girls here now and are Hkely to be until 
 after the Easter vacation; but they will let you 
 alone if you insist. . . . 
 
 Let me know at once if you will venture it for 
 the holidays, as I may have to bespeak your room 
 in advance. I have hunted out some glorious 
 walks and believe that — if you can bring books 
 enough to beguile your mornings and evenings — 
 we can have a first-rate time. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 P.S. There is a ghastly piano: fortunately it 
 is so ghastly that few of our virtuosi brave its 
 terrors. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 The Harbor View 
 [East Gloucester, April ii, 1900.] 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 The room is all right, whether you come Satur- 
 day or Monday. Perhaps if you want to like the 
 place you had better wait till Monday to avoid 
 getting your first impression under the Sunday 
 blight; but you best know your own fortitude. 
 Bring outing duds, of course: possibly a boiled 
 shirt for evenings, if you 're haughty. ... If you 
 
 122 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 come In the afternoon, and will let me know when, 
 I will meet you at the station. If I am not there 
 take trolley car which passes station, labelled 
 Rocky (not Rubber) Neck, and tell the conductor 
 to put you off at the Harbor View. It is a two- 
 mile ride, over a very tempestuous road-bed. 
 Bring heavy shoes, if possible waterproof, as the 
 moors are apt to be dampish in the low places and 
 we don't want to have to keep to the roads. A 
 cap is an absolute necessity for comfort in shore 
 tramps. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 Harbor View Inn. 
 Gloucester, Mass., April 30. 
 Dear Rob: 
 
 Tomorrow would seem to be the first of May, 
 and I am sending, according to agreement, the 
 three chapters of the text-book which I have 
 blocked out. They are in first draft and I fear 
 not very legible in all places, but there is no type- 
 writer in this village and I had n't the heart to 
 copy those hundred and ten weary pages. You 
 can easily decipher enough to afford grounds for 
 a curse-out. 
 
 123 
 
'SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 I should especially like to have criticism as 
 to proportion ; I find this the most difficult mat- 
 ter to gauge and adjust. In general, I realize 
 that the Anglo-Saxon chapter and the chapter 
 on the drama before Shakespeare are both too 
 long. I think I can cut them down some in re- 
 writing. 
 
 I am convinced by the part I have done that 
 we must make a great effort to keep the thing 
 simple and broad. To do this without falling 
 into the stick-candy style is hard; I realize 
 that in many places I have been narrow and 
 mixed, in my struggles to convey some little 
 nutriment of fact in the kissing-comfits of gen- 
 eralization. 
 
 As you will see by the postmark I have fled 
 Beacon Hill and set up my everlasting rest by the 
 sea. This little fishing village is a bewitching 
 place, and the country about, to the extremest 
 tip of Cape Ann, is as good as Brittany. . . . 
 
 As ever yours, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 124 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Mary L. Mason 
 
 Harbor View Inn. 
 Gloucester, Mass., 
 
 May 1st, 1900. 
 My dear Mrs. Mason: 
 
 Gloucester continues to be almost too good to 
 be true. Dan and I had a capital ten days to- 
 gether, but the orchestra was only tuning up then ; 
 now the first theme is being given out, high, high 
 in the violins. Pace Ap thorp. ^ 
 
 Mr. C is a good man and true: he scorns 
 
 the doctrine that discretion is the better part of 
 friendship. Of such are the kingdom of heaven. 
 Earnestly yours, 
 
 W. V. Moody. 
 
 To Mary L, Mason 
 
 The Harbor View. 
 East Gloucester, Mass. 
 May 16, 1900. 
 Dear Mrs. Mason: 
 
 Your invitation is very tempting, though as far 
 as the Gloucester spring is concerned I 'm willing 
 
 ^ W. F. Apthorp, who was at that time compiling the analyt- 
 ical program books of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 
 
 125 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 to back it for handsomeness even against the 
 Milton variety. Promptly at 9 o'clock each morn- 
 ing I put on blinders, stuff my ears with wax, and 
 strap myself to the desk, in order to do my day's 
 stint on a text-book on English Literature (God 
 save the mark!) which I have to get a certain 
 portion of done this month. . . . 
 
 Faithfully yours, 
 William Vaughn Moody. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 [Undated. Probably May or June, 1900.] 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 I will answer as categorically as you inquire : 
 
 1st. I beseech you to come. 
 
 2nd. I will join you at luncheon on the beach,* 
 and offer my services as guide, philosopher, and 
 friend. 
 
 3rd. I will not read the Ode, the Faith-Healer, 
 nor any other damned thing under the shining 
 canopy. I will talk with you, walk with you, play 
 with you, and stay with you, and so following ; but 
 I will not read for you nor bleed for you. What 
 news on the Rial to? 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 * A small picnic party was proposed. 
 126 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Prout's Neck. [Maine.] 
 June 23, iQCX). 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 , . . The only hotel open in the place is this 
 one, the Checkley, which I tackled in despair after 
 knocking in vain at the doors of several less im- 
 posing hostelries. I was agreeably surprised to 
 find I could get a small but fairly comfortable 
 room here for ten plunks per. . . . The high 
 piazzas command a great view of the bay and 
 open sea. ... Of the eighteen people now here, 
 I am the only one who could be called a star, but 
 there are prospects of a more or less stellar sort 
 for the immediate future. The place is so roomy 
 that I don't believe the non-stellar people will get 
 on our nerves. ... If you decide to come, as I 
 hope, the following is the manner. 
 
 Boat leaves India Wharf at 7 p.m. Be on hand 
 by 6.15 in order to get stateroom. Fare (including 
 stateroom) to Portland, $2.00. Go to bed early, 
 for she gets into Portland Harbor long before 
 dawn and there is thenceforward a hell of a noise 
 unloading things. You can stay in bed until 7, 
 and breakfast on the boat. Take street car 
 
 127 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 passing wharf, marked Union Station, which will 
 deposit you in front of the ticket window. Ask 
 politely the man behind the window to give you a 
 ticket to Scarboro Beach, price sixteen cents. At 
 Scarboro Beach {not Scarboro Crossing) you will 
 find a stage running to this hotel, a four mile ride 
 for which you pay 50 cents. With these few hints 
 to guide you, and the exercise of your native 
 sagacity and presence of mind in peril, you will 
 arrive. 
 
 Be of good courage, and come. Don*t forget 
 your bathing suit. 
 
 Yours, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Chocorua, N. H. 
 July 29th, 1900. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 Immediately on my arrival I was swooped down 
 upon by Mr. Bartlett, and soon transferred bag 
 and baggage to his house, where I am living in 
 undisturbed possession of the upper story. We 
 get our own breakfast and take dinner and supper 
 at the hotel. He wants me to say that when you 
 come next week he hopes you will join us. I think 
 
 128 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 we could have a very jolly time together. The 
 old boy is in marvellous form, and stars the pass- 
 ing hours with immortal phrases. 
 
 As ever, 
 
 Will. 
 
 To Robert Morss Lovett 
 
 Chocorua, N. H. 
 Aug. 1 8th, 1900. 
 Dear Rob: 
 
 I am, as you see, at Chocorua, and expect to be 
 here about two weeks longer. ... I am working 
 now on the Milton period; have it something 
 more than half done. 
 
 I am staying with a Mr. Bartlett, ex-sculptor, 
 art critic, and in spite of all a magnificent old goat 
 and man of God. 
 
 Yours, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Edmund Clarence Stedman 
 
 I Willow Street, 
 
 Boston, Oct. 30, 1900. 
 My dear Mr. Stedman: 
 
 I give myself the pleasure of sending, in advance 
 129 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 of publication, The Masque of Judgment, about 
 which I wrote you a word or two last spring. 
 Doubtless you are overwhelmed with tributes of 
 this questionable kind, yet I am bold enough to 
 hope you will read the book, even if it remains in 
 your mind as a symbol of grotesquely ambitious 
 "first volumes." 
 
 Another copy, properly bound, will be sent on 
 publication, the second week of November. 
 Believe me 
 
 Very earnestly yours, 
 William Vaughn Moody. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Salmagundi Club. 
 14 West 12th St., N. Y. 
 Nov. 14, 1900. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 ... I am pretty lonely here, as Robinson has 
 gone to Hoboken or Spuytenduyvil or somewhere, 
 to live with the goats, and I only see him once a 
 week. For a few days I thought the noise would 
 drive me wild, and I was more than once on the 
 point of fleeing back to the Hermitage, which by 
 comparison seems to the fond eye of memory 
 to deserve its name. There are three hundred 
 
 130 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 and twenty-three hand-organs and ninety-seven 
 pianos on our block, and every hour thirty-five 
 thousand drays loaded with sheet iron pass the 
 house. Irving Place, you know, is a quiet old- 
 fashioned neighborhood, so we are justly proud 
 of these slight evidences of animation. 
 
 The theatres (which are after all what I came 
 for) are good, and a great resource. . . . 
 
 Will. 
 
 My address is 71 Irving Place. 
 
 To Mary L, Mason 
 
 The Players. 
 16 Gramercy Park. 
 New York, Nov. 30, 1900. 
 My dear Mrs. Mason: 
 
 I am sorry that you found the upshot of the 
 Masque (I mean its main drift and meaning) 
 negative or destructive. I did not intend it to be 
 so. For me the kernel of the thing was Raphael's 
 humanistic attitude and Uriel's philosophy, 
 especially his ''confession of faith" in Act iii. 
 Scene 11. The rest of it was only mythological 
 machinery for exhibiting the opposed attitude 
 and philosophy — that of the deniers of life. I 
 hoped that the positive meaning might disengage 
 
 131 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 itself as a kind of aroma or emotion from the 
 whole, and that the poem would thus subserve 
 just such a brave love of life and faith in its 
 issues as you plead for. If this does not happen 
 for the sympathetic reader, then I have failed 
 wholly. 
 
 Your praise of the manner of the poem I am 
 grateful for, especially as it came at a moment of 
 deep discouragement. Believe me, 
 
 Always faithfully yours, 
 
 William Vaughn Moody. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 The Players. 
 1 6 Gramercy Park. 
 New York, Nov, 30, 1900. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 Your generous praise of the Masque gave me 
 great joy, for I was going through a crisis of dis- 
 couragement which made my months of labor and 
 engrossment upon it seem pitiably futile. I am 
 alarmed about myself, when I notice that the 
 fluctuations of heaven-scaling confidence and 
 something very like despair, instead of decreasing 
 as they ought to do, seem to increase with my 
 years and knowledge. I don't understand it at 
 
 132 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 all, nor do I see any way of combating it that 
 promises much. 
 
 Your sister [in-law] has just written, and from 
 her tone I gather that she found the total impres- 
 sion of the book rather gloomy and pessimistic. 
 I 'm afraid I have n't made clear enough the posi- 
 tive part — the love of life and belief in its issues 
 — which I meant to be the core of the matter. 
 How do you feel about it? 
 
 Always yours. 
 
 Will. 
 To Mrs. C. H. Toy 
 
 Century Club, New York. 
 December 12, 1900. 
 Dear Mrs. Toy: 
 
 Your objection to the "theology** of the 
 Masque would be well taken if there were any 
 theology in it. There is n*t an ounce, or at least 
 if there is it is there against my will. Of course I 
 didn't intend my "strangely unpleasant" God 
 to be taken seriously. To me the whole meaning 
 and value of the poem lies in the humanistic atti- 
 tude and character of Raphael, the philosophic 
 outlook of Uriel, and the plea for passion as a 
 means of salvation everywhere latent. The rest 
 
 133 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 of it IS only mythological machinery for symboliz- 
 ing the opposed doctrine — that of the denial of 
 life. As Christianity (contrary of course to the 
 wish and meaning of its founder) has historically 
 linked itself with this doctrine, I included certain 
 aspects of it in this mythological apparatus — 
 always with a semi-satirical intention. I meant to 
 write a poem, pure and simple; and my western 
 friends, with the naive t6 proper to them, seem to 
 have accepted it as such; but Cambridge insists 
 on treating it as a theological treatise. As such, 
 they can but find it pretty foolish, I fear. . . . 
 
 From the time of Moody's return to Chicago at the 
 beginning of 1901 his letters, much less frequent and 
 voluminous than formerly, leave many gaps in the 
 record of his life. He was now able to get longer leaves 
 of absence from his teaching, and spent much time in 
 travelling, both in America and in Europe. His love 
 of wild life led him to the Rocky Mountains with 
 Mr. Hamlin Garland in the summer of 1901, and to 
 Arizona, alone, in the spring of 1904 — excursions 
 which later bore fruit in his first published prose play, 
 "The Great Divide." He made a trip to Greece in 
 1902. The rest of this period he divided between 
 Boston, New York, and Chicago. The chief literary 
 event was the publication of his second poetic drama> 
 *'The Fire-Bringer," in March, 1904. 
 
 134 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Chicago, Jan. i6, 1901. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 Many thanks for the post-card containing 
 extract from Robinson's letter. Such words from 
 him cannot but give me immense satisfaction, 
 both because he is a man who weighs his words 
 and because they apply in this case to a kind of 
 writing with which he has n't much patience in 
 general (I mean the "history of the world" kind 
 of thing) so that I don't feel compelled in honesty 
 to discount for personal bias. Well, he can afford 
 to be generous. 
 
 It has been the very devil to get down to work 
 again, after my long and keenly relished holiday. 
 Chicago seemed uglier and grimmer than I had 
 believed possible. There was nothing to do but 
 shut my eyes, put my sensibilities in the lower 
 bureau drawer, and sail in. Gradually the benefi- 
 cent numbness of drudgery is stealing over me, 
 and that unilluminated dogged patience which 
 constitutes my substitute for moral courage is 
 beginning to possess what in other seasons I am 
 wont to refer to exuberantly as my soul. It is at 
 such times as this that I envy you most keenly 
 
 135 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 your unflinching hold upon spiritual truth, and 
 your power of walking in the light of it. The best 
 I can do is to hump my back, turn down my hat 
 brim, and stoically count the number of streams 
 running down my back, until the damned drizzle 
 decides to cease. . . . 
 
 Write when you feel like it, and don't till you 
 do. I mean do when you do rather than don't. 
 That is to say do do and don't don't. See? 
 
 Will. 
 
 To Edwin Arlington Robinson 
 
 The Quadrangle Club. 
 Chicago, Jan. 24, 1901. 
 Dear Robinson: 
 
 You will not have thought it was indifference 
 to your *'poor words of congratulation" about 
 the Masque which has kept me from answering 
 sooner. What you said gave me the deepest — 
 joy, I was going to say; but remembering your 
 distrust of exuberant language, I will say satis- 
 faction. Still, it was joy, all the same — the feel- 
 ing was exuberant enough to warrant, this once, 
 my florid vocabulary. Your words were the more 
 grateful because they came as a surprise. I 
 thought in New York that you were bravely try- 
 
 X36 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 ing to be generous (you would have said "just") 
 toward a thing you rootedly deplored but sus- 
 pected yourself of being by nature prejudiced 
 against. As you had more than done your duty 
 on this hypothesis, I could not but consider this 
 later testimony as being the voice of the natural 
 man, speaking the faith that was in him ; and there- 
 fore I rejoiced. 
 
 Chicago is several kinds of hell, but I won't 
 weary you with asseverations that I am being 
 shamefully victimized by fate; you won't believe 
 it, and besides it 's a lie. I am merely paying the 
 market rates for my bread and beer, commodities 
 for which many a better man has been villain- 
 ously overcharged. Some of the vacation memo- 
 ries I most like to hark back to and mouse dream- 
 ily over are those walks we had from Riverdale 
 to Yonkers, especially the last one. This is n't a 
 letter, but it would be a pleasant fiction and a 
 graceful act for you to consider it so, and write me 
 one. 
 
 Always yours, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 137 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Mrs, C. H. Toy 
 
 Chicago, 
 March 2, 1901. 
 Dear Mrs. Toy: 
 
 . . . Life here is as ever. More different kinds 
 of a mistake and an affliction than you can dream 
 — you there in that gentle elegiac Cambridge. 
 Not that I would give up my journey through the 
 realms of woe ; I am learning a lot down here, and 
 each descending circle of the lamentable pit makes 
 me surer that I did well to come. But ah, I long 
 for a Virgil to comment and illuminate the thing 
 now and then ! Even Dante had to be personally 
 conducted through hell, and I guess he was right 
 smart more of a hero than what I be. It 's melting 
 outside today, and the sun is doing a South 
 Halstead street bunco game on a confiding world. 
 Here is a poem inspired by my last attempt to 
 wade the street: 
 
 Gutters sing. 
 Is it spring? 
 Does old Winter 
 Now beginter 
 Quit? 
 Nit! 
 138 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 Long time yet, 
 You bet, 
 
 Ere G. S.^ 
 Comes to bless 
 
 Us. I guess 
 Yes. 
 
 These ''Thoughts on a Thaw" I think of sub- 
 mitting as my contribution to the next edition of 
 The Poets of Indiana: an Anthology; just pubHshed 
 by Macmillan. At present I 'm not represented, 
 but I '11 force them to recognize me yet. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Wagon Wheel Gap. 
 Colorado, Aug. 30, 1901. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 If to do were as easy as to know what 't were 
 good to do, I should not have thus neglected the 
 best of friends and good fellows. Your two letters 
 and the picture reached me — I am ashamed to 
 think how many months ago, and I was too low in 
 my mind even to send a word of goodbye on your 
 departure for Paris. I waved a loving, if dispirited, 
 farewell from the central core of Chicago's smoke 
 
 * Gentle Spring. 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 cloud, and in that infernal seat of contemplation 
 have often mused upon your goings and comings 
 in the Latin Quarter. Tai pauvre. Nous partons 
 aujourd'hui. By pronouncing these mysterious 
 formulae I have many times evoked you in con- 
 frontation with that so elusive world of will and 
 idea which we once endeavored to comprehend 
 together and found and shall find entirely incom- 
 prehensible. . . . 
 
 At present, as the superscription of this scrawl 
 will show you, I am in the wilds of the Rockies, 
 where I have been camping and trailing with 
 Hamlin Garland, in some of the savagest old 
 country these States afford. Garland had the bad 
 luck to get his foot crushed (his horse fell on it in 
 scrambling out of a bog up a steep bank) and he is 
 laid up for a week or two. Meantime I am doing 
 some of the mountain passes on horseback, riding 
 from thirty to fifty miles a day, trying to get the 
 stale taste of a year's academica out of my mouth. 
 
 I am free now for a year. I shall stay west 
 (somewhere near Chicago) until I get that 
 wretched text-book done (this time it has got to 
 be done!). . . . This scrawl is all I am up to just 
 now, after a hard day's ride and last night spent 
 sleeplessly in a deserted mountain hut with three 
 
 140 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 or four other benighted travellers. Travellers is 
 euphemistic: with the doubtful exception of 
 myself they were tramps — miners out of a job 
 hoboing it to a new mining camp. And down- 
 right good fellows they were, too, barring the 
 absence of certain niceties of person — which, 
 indeed, our somewhat casual quarters were not 
 calculated to encourage. If by good luck this 
 finds you at Chocorua, greet for me the Grand 
 Old Man and his pals the mountains. Cull for me 
 a morning phrase, big as Whiteface and dewy as 
 those morning glories on the projected and now I 
 trust realized pergola. I grow disproportioned. 
 But cull it for me natheless (as the Bard would 
 say) and send it to me along with an account of 
 yourself in all the moods and tenses. 
 
 Always yours, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Mary L. Mason 
 
 I Willow St. 
 [Boston.] Dec. 27 [1901]. 
 My dear Mrs. Mason: 
 
 It was immensely kind of you to remember me 
 on Christmas day. I have been munching the 
 ginger as I work, and eagerly watching for some 
 
 141 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 effect on my style. Did you send it in that hope? 
 If so, I trust that means you are sufficiently inter- 
 ested in the fate of the text-book to be willing to 
 do some more typewriting for it. . . . Will you 
 let me know whether to send you more MS., and 
 also will you send me a memorandum of what we 
 owe you for the two chapters on the novel? 
 
 Yours, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Josephine Preston Peahody 
 
 I Willow St. 
 Jan. 5, 1902. 
 Dear J. P. P., 
 
 I am not going to apologize for not telling you 
 so sooner, but am going to tell you at once and 
 to your face that I think the Play ["Marlowe"] 
 is a beauty. For honest beauty and wisdom and 
 strength it beats Stephen Phillips and the rest of 
 them out of the world. Your blank verse has 
 strengthened incalculably since Fortune and M. E. 
 It has just the clearness, grip, and nervousness I 
 have been looking for it to attain. The ventrilo- 
 quism of your dialogue impresses me more at each 
 reading — a great and hard thing to achieve in 
 
 142 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 blank verse. I can count on one hand the drama- 
 tists who have learned that trick of mirroring 
 character — mental status — etc., in the move- 
 ment of a blank verse line. Your Marlowe is a 
 woman's Marlowe, but all the better for that. 
 He is what he ought to have been and perhaps 
 essentially was, underneath, though I doubt if he 
 found it out — probably went to the dogs for not 
 finding it out. Your Alison is a man's Alison, and 
 all the better for that! (Only a man would never 
 call her ''the Little Quietude," and I wish you 
 had n't. I know I'm a brute for not liking that 
 and the ''shrine" business, but I don't.) But all 
 the figures are greatly energized — snap fire when 
 you touch them — and Marlowe is full of those 
 brave translunary things that the first poets had. 
 By all the Muses, we shall have an American 
 drama yet, and it will date from Marlowe: a 
 
 Play. 
 
 I have been living in a night-mare since I got 
 here, and have seen no one. The strain is nearly 
 over, and I am beginning to remember once more 
 that this world is after all a real world, full of such 
 good things as friends and friendly talk. I am 
 coming out to see you in a day or two, and you 
 must n't shut the door on me because my manners 
 
 143 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 are bad. My heart is a good heart, and wears 
 Kentish russet — 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Mary L. Mason 
 
 I Willow St. 
 Boston, Jan. 27, 1902. 
 My dear Mrs. Mason: 
 
 Your word of praise for the poor text-book was 
 most cheering; I shall hope and trust, after this, 
 that it is n't as bad as it seems to me. It lies on 
 my spirit like Incubus. 
 
 . . . Your feminine mathematics juggled you 
 out of about fifteen hundred words on your last 
 count. Thank God that you are dealing with a 
 just man, and forswear addition: it is a vain 
 thing for safety. 
 
 Always yours, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Mackinac Island, Mich. 
 Oct. 22, 1903. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 Rumor vaguely reports you as domiciled at the 
 Benedick, and my hopes that you are so are too 
 strong to allow me to doubt. I have spent the 
 
 144 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 summer on this little island in Lake Huron, fin- 
 ishing the poem of which I read you the beginning 
 (you may remember) last winter.^ I have often 
 thought of you and wondered where you were. 
 Now that winter and return to city life is at hand, 
 and the possibility of my spending said winter in 
 New York is good, my eagerness to hear from you, 
 and if the good fates will permit me, to get quar- 
 ters within hearing distance of your voice and 
 your piano, reaches the point of epistolary explo- 
 sion — as you know, a high point with me, . . . 
 
 To Josephine Preston Peahody 
 
 Chicago, March 22 [1904]. 
 Dear J. P. P.: 
 
 I was sorry not to see you again, especially if 
 you were primed with talk about It; for I, as 
 always, am wearying to know about It, but seem 
 daily farther from achieving knowledge. The 
 more I have to do with It, the more It escapes 
 my thought and definition. I don't mean to imply 
 that you were going to think or define, but I 
 suspect that you were going to throw out memo- 
 rable speech, while revolving invisible with illu- 
 mination upon your stellar axis. 
 
 * Probably "The Fire-Bringer." 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 I am hesitating whether or not to go to the 
 Great Desert of Arizona and live with the Indians 
 and "lung-ers" this spring. Probably I shall go. 
 If I never come back, but stay and choose some 
 savage woman to rear my dusky race, remember 
 that I intended a copy of the Fire-Eater [sic] for 
 you, with a handsome inscription. Yours, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Edwin Arlington Robinson 
 
 Hotel Baltimore. 
 Kansas City, Mo., March 29, 1904. 
 
 Dear Robinson: 
 
 Behold me en route for Arizona, the Painted 
 Desert, and aboriginal life. . . . 
 
 The Fire-Eater [The Fire-Bringer] reached me 
 just a minute before I left Chicago, and I had 
 time only to scratch your initials on the fly-leaf 
 of a copy, and forgot to leave your address behind ; 
 nevertheless, the little book (of which I suspect 
 you heartily disapprove, for reasons) will reach 
 you in due course. 
 
 Always yours, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 146 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 Kansas City, Mo. 
 March 29, 1904. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 I am a thousand times obliged for your friendly- 
 offices in negotiating the lease and sending on my 
 stuff. After I wrote I became conscience-stricken 
 over the magnitude of the trouble I had put you 
 to ; but the chance I had for going to Arizona and 
 seeing some aboriginal life was exceptional, and I 
 could not afford to go on to New York to make the 
 arrangements myself ; at least to do so would have 
 so seriously depleted my funds that I should prob- 
 ably have had to abandon the western trip after 
 said arrangements had been made. I do not see 
 what you get out of it except the good man*s 
 ancient reward (too much relied upon by putters 
 of others to trouble) and the satisfaction of having 
 
 near at hand and in pleasant quarters. I have 
 
 written urging him to occupy the room, and told 
 him to apply to you for the key to the bureau. . . . 
 My book^ turned up (advanced copies) just as I 
 was leaving the house to take the western train; 
 I had time to put your initials on a fly-leaf, and 
 
 1 "The Fire-Bringer." 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 M. L. M's on another, and they ought to reach 
 you in a day or two. I shall drop you a line now 
 and then from the shadow of a giant-cactus or 
 from the top of a Zuni pueblo. 
 
 Ever yours, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 P.S. No, Chicago has not been chucked, merely 
 happily relegated to the future. 
 
 To Percy MacKaye 
 
 2970 Groveland Ave., 
 Chicago, Aug. 5, 1904. 
 My dear Mr. MacKaye, 
 
 Let me thank you very heartily for your 
 generous words concerning "The Fire-Bringer." 
 Such words would be very pleasant to hear from 
 any one, and they are trebly so when that one is a 
 fellow-workman in the poetic drama. It is true, 
 as Mr. Shipman has told you, that I am heart 
 and soul dedicated to the conviction that modern 
 life can be presented on the stage in the poetic 
 mediums, and adequately presented only in that 
 way. If I am anywhere near Cornish this summer, 
 as is not improbable, it will give me genuine 
 pleasure to look you up. In any case you will find 
 me from the first of November on, at 51 West loth 
 
 148 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 Street, New York; and I hope that you will come 
 to see me there. With thanks and good wishes, 
 I am Earnestly yours 
 
 Wm. Vaughn Moody. 
 
 Percy MacKaye Esq. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 51 West loth St. 
 New York, Oct. 8, 1904. 
 Dear Dan: 
 
 I got your quotation about St. L6 and the Val 
 de Vire, and was delighted with it, as I should 
 have assured you if you had given me an address. 
 By the way, I have put "Old Pourquoi" (do you 
 remember?) into a poem, which I think will 
 amuse you. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Edmund Clarence Stedman 
 
 2970 Groveland Ave. 
 CmcAGo, Jan. 12, 1905. 
 
 My dear Mr. Stedman: 
 
 Your letter has followed me deviously through 
 the south and north again, with its most friendly 
 
 149 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 message. That you should have taken the trouble 
 to write me at such length and with your own 
 hand gives double worth to the news of my nomi- 
 nation for membership in the Institute. As for 
 this latter let me say at once that I am grateful 
 to you for proposing my name, and if elected shall 
 accept the honor gladly. Your generous words 
 concerning my ''Fire-Bringer" have given me 
 great joy. The poem got little praise, and that 
 little mostly misdirected, so that I had come to 
 think of it, as — so far as my hoped-for audience 
 was concerned — a failure. But if you like it, it is 
 no failure, and I can go on with a good heart. It is 
 a vast pity you did not carry out your intention 
 of treating the theme yourself. It takes some gen- 
 erosity to feel so, since your poem would have 
 rendered mine superfluous, if not impertinence. 
 But I am at bottom more jealous for Poetry, and 
 especially for the poetry which shall be named and 
 recognized as in a large sense American, than I am 
 for my own poems, though jealous enough for 
 them, Heaven knows, according to the flesh! Your 
 beautiful Alectry6n, taken in connection with 
 what you tell me of your thwarted intention, 
 shows how parlously near I came to having my 
 theme ^^ assumed" into a heaven of invention 
 
 150 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 where I should neither have dared nor wished to 
 pursue it. You have my — so to speak — ''post 
 humorous " gratitude, with the reservation named. 
 I am particularly glad that you do not share the 
 current prejudice against such subjects, in favor 
 of a literary Americanism which I, for my own 
 part, cannot but deem false in theory and barren 
 in practice. . . . Believe me, Faithfully yours, 
 William Vaughn Moody. 
 
 The studio at 51 West loth St., occupied by a friend 
 during the Arizona trip, made a convenient New York 
 headquarters, which Moody retained for some time. 
 He was back there in the fall of 1904, and through the 
 following spring. His work was now eagerly sought 
 by some of the magazines, and one of the pleasantest 
 friendships of this time was that with Richard Watson 
 Gilder of the Century. Mr. Gilder's poem, referred to 
 in the letters, was printed in the Atlantic Monthly for 
 June, 1905, under the title, "A New Poet." 
 
 A NEW POET 
 
 BY R. W. GILDER 
 
 I 
 
 Friends, beware! 
 
 Stop babbling! Hark, a sound is in the air! 
 
 Above the pretty songs of schools 
 
 (Not of music made, but rules), 
 
 151 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 Above the panic rush for gold 
 
 And emptinesses manifold, 
 
 And selling of the soul for phantom fame, 
 
 And reek of praises where there should be blame ; 
 
 Over the dust and muck, 
 
 The buzz and roar of wheels, 
 
 Another music steals, — 
 
 A right, true note is struck. 
 
 n 
 
 Friends, beware! 
 
 A sound of singing in the air! 
 
 The love song of a man who loves his fellow men ; 
 
 Mother-love and country-love, and the love of sea 
 
 and fen; 
 Lovely thoughts and mighty thoughts and thoughts 
 
 that linger long; 
 There has come to the old world's singing the thrill 
 
 of a brave new song. 
 
 Ill 
 
 They said there were no more singers, 
 But listen ! — A master voice ! 
 A voice of the true joy-bringers! 
 Now will ye heed and rejoice. 
 Or pass on the other side. 
 And wait till the singer hath died, 
 Then weep o'er his voiceless clay? 
 Friends, beware! 
 
 1S2 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 A keen, new sound is in the air, — 
 Know ye a poet's coming is the old world's judg- 
 ment day! 
 
 To Richard Watson Gilder 
 
 51 West ioth St. 
 New York, April 17 [1905]. 
 Dear Mr. Gilder, 
 
 At the risk of seeming ungracious, and insensi- 
 ble of the honor which you have planned to do 
 me, I am going to ask you to publish the poem in 
 the Atlantic without my initials. I do so because 
 of no boyish mock-modesty, but because I know 
 in the bottom of my heart that I have not yet 
 reached a point in the practice of our divine art 
 which entitles me to this sort of public recogni- 
 tion from a man like you. Even if you are ardently 
 and generously minded enough to think other- 
 wise, I beg that you will yield to my own deep 
 feeling in the matter, which I express only after 
 long thought. Try to ascribe my rejection of the 
 offered honor to a sentiment no less magnanimous 
 than was the one which prompted you to extend 
 it, and believe me 
 
 Always faithfully yours, 
 
 Wm. Vaughn Moody. 
 153 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Richard Watson Gilder 
 
 51 West ioth St. 
 New York, April 19th. 
 Dear Mr. Gilder, 
 
 I am grateful to you for acceding to my request 
 about the initials, and for understanding my 
 motive. I am also much obliged to you for the 
 sight of your letter to Traubel about the Whit- 
 man letters. Whitman did himself sore wrong 
 in many of his judgments — but for the matter of 
 that so do we all. It is good to rise above personal 
 injustice as you do in your lines written for the 
 dinner, which I return (together with the letter) 
 with thanks for the privilege of seeing them. 
 
 To Richard Watson Gilder 
 
 51 West ioth St. 
 New York, Thursday. 
 Dear Mr. Gilder, 
 
 The poem made me very proud and happy, 
 and I shall preserve it among my most cherished 
 possessions, both for its generous personal praise 
 and for its intrinsic beauty. I have made the 
 correction of which you speak. 
 
 154 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 To Richard Watson Gilder 
 
 [Posted April 27, 1905.] 
 Dear Mr. Gilder: 
 
 I scribble this lying on my back in the hospital, 
 where on Friday last I underwent an operation 
 which proved rather serious. I did not tell you 
 about it and do not send you the address now 
 because I know that your native kindness would 
 lead you to take all sorts of trouble about it, and 
 my own instinct is just to lie low and not peep 
 until nature restores me again to an upright 
 posture and the self-respect thereunto appertain- 
 ing. I am well looked after, and getting along 
 capitally under the circumstances. I started this 
 note to thank you for letting me see Robinson's 
 note, and to say that I would send you a poem or 
 two for inspection when I get up again. 
 
 I know you must be terribly cut up over 
 Jefferson's death. Yours, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Edwin Arlington Robinson 
 
 33 East 33RD St., 
 New York, May 10 [1905]. 
 Dear Robinson, 
 
 Your note of inquiry and expostulation reached 
 
 155 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 me some days ago, but I have hardly been up to 
 writing before today. I am happy to report that 
 the operation which I underwent three weeks ago 
 has succeeded admirably, and I shall soon be on 
 my feet again — at least on one of them and a 
 cane or two. For the first few days after they 
 sliced me I had a squeak for it ; temperature any- 
 thing in the shade and pulse hopping like a jack- 
 rabbit who descries Teddy on the horizon. How- 
 ever, Nature soon decided that I was of more 
 use to her in an organized state than as phos- 
 phates, and since then I have made a rapid recov- 
 ery. . . . 
 
 To Richard Watson Gilder 
 
 51 West ioth St. 
 May 13th, 1905. 
 Dear Mr. Gilder, 
 
 Yes, I am out of the hospital, thank God, owing 
 to my flat refusal to endure any longer the hideous 
 monotony of blank walls and blank hours (the 
 latter my own fault, I know), but I am not yet 
 very much master of my machine — only able to 
 hobble tentatively about on one leg and a cane or 
 two. 
 
 156 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 I do not want to go away for the summer with- 
 out seeing you again, for who knows where either 
 of us will be by the time the leaves fall? If you 
 wish, I will bring a few verses to read, but I do 
 not think that I have anything suitable for the 
 magazine. If I am to do this I must read them to 
 you solus (this you will grant to my constitutional 
 fear of an ''audience"). 
 
 Thanks for St. Gaudens' note. It is pleasant 
 to possess anything from the hand of that noble 
 artist. 
 
 Faithfully yours, 
 
 Wm. Vaughn Moody. 
 
 Mrs. Gilder puts me under another debt by a 
 second jar of that delectable coagulation. 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Mary L, Mason 
 
 51 West ioth St. 
 Monday. [Postmark, June 5, 1905.] 
 Dear Mary Mason, 
 
 Though I must sorrowfully confess to having 
 been ''beguiled" by no dames, yet so beguiling a 
 note as yours of this morning is a sufficient recom- 
 pense. My sister has watched over me with so 
 hawklike an eye, to prevent me from over- 
 
 157 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 exerting my lame leg, that I have not been able 
 to escape as far as your house. This week I shall 
 make another and more desperate attempt to run 
 the blockade, and in case of success shall drop in 
 upon you some evening to swap operation-stories. 
 . . . You must not look to find me the picture of 
 grace — the pardlike spirit beautiful and swift — 
 that I once was. . . . 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 To Richard Watson Gilder 
 
 2970 Groveland Ave., 
 Chicago, III., Aug. 23, '05. 
 Dear Mr. Gilder, 
 
 The account of ** housework" in your country, 
 and especially your contribution to the cere- 
 monies, gave me the keenest pleasure. I am an 
 ancient and — as I thought — irreconcilable 
 enemy of the Whitmanic verse-mode, but your 
 handling of it goes far to prove me wrong and 
 baptize me into the new dispensation. The 
 bee-filled linden-tree, "humming . . . like the 
 plucked string of a violin," is unforgettably good. 
 As regards the "Second Coming" I would say to 
 the possible illustrator that the caulking-man was 
 a strong, sensual-looking young Greek of the 
 
 158 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 island type, naked to the waist, with cropped 
 hair and bare feet; the person speaking to him 
 was curiously spiritual in feature, slightly bearded, 
 bare-headed, dressed in the long flowing gown of 
 the Greek priesthood, rusty black in tone. He 
 looked like an Armenian. I will try to clarify the 
 "watery death" stanza, either by distillation or 
 plain sopping up. 
 
 The President's Outlook article was undeniably 
 kind in intention and will doubtless do Robinson 
 much worldly good. As for its substance, since 
 we have adopted the absolute despotic form of 
 government I deem it best that such treasonable 
 matter as criticism of the imperial utterances, 
 even on such a trifling subject as poetry, be not 
 committed to ink. I have no taste for labor in the 
 mines of Siberia — I mean Alaska — with a ball 
 and chain on my left leg. 
 
 Various circumstances make it difficult for me 
 to go East as I had intended, but I may go on 
 later. If so I shall surely give myself the pleasure 
 of seeing you at Four Brooks. Sincerely yours, 
 
 Wm. Vaughn Moody. 
 
 "The President's Outlook article" was a very com- 
 plimentary review by Colonel Roosevelt of Mr. Edwin 
 Arlington Robinson's "Captain Craig." 
 
 159 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 Early in 1906 Moody finished his prose play, "The 
 Great Divide," which received some trial performances 
 that spring in Chicago under the title "A Sabine 
 Woman," and was regularly put on the stage the fol- 
 lowing fall, in New York, by Miss Margaret Anglin 
 and Mr. Henry Miller. The opening night was 
 October 4th. 
 
 To Richard Watson Gilder 
 
 51 West ioth St. 
 New York, Feb. 5 [1906]. 
 Dear Mr. Gilder, 
 
 I do not know what the scope or function of the 
 MacDowell Club is, so that I cannot tell whether 
 my new play ["The Great Divide"] would be 
 suitable for its stage or not. I am anxious to get 
 it produced on the professional stage, by a pro- 
 fessional troupe. Miss Marlowe and Sothern, 
 however, I am sure would not cotton to it, as it is 
 '* realism" of a rather grim and uncompromising 
 type, without the romantic glamor which they 
 affect — at least what romantic glamor there is 
 is implicit and present only to the probing eye of 
 the elect. I should very much like to get Henry 
 Miller to take it, but I guess that is out of the 
 question. The "Fire-Bringer" — if all plans go 
 through — is to be produced next winter in 
 
 160 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 Chicago, in a new theatre which is being started 
 there. 
 
 To Percy MacKaye 
 
 Hotel Seville, New York City» 
 Oct. II, 1906. 
 Dear Percy, 
 
 Thanks for your cordial note about the play. 
 Broadway the formidable has indeed roared us as 
 any sucking dove, for this once. It*s like taking 
 candy from a child. I am making my plans to get 
 down to Philadelphia for your opening. Save me 
 a ticket, and I shall come if it 's a possible thing. 
 
 Faithfully yours. 
 
 Will. 
 
 To Daniel Gregory Mason 
 
 [New York.] 
 Oct. 12, 1906. 
 Dear Dan, 
 
 I had tickets in my pocket for you and Mary, 
 for the opening night of the play, and hoped you 
 would turn up to use them. When you did n't 
 I consoled myself with the reflection that, in case 
 the thing was a failure, you would be spared pain, 
 and I also, by your absence. When, at the end of 
 
 161 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 the first act, it looked like a go, and still more 
 when, after the second, the audience rose like a 
 sea in a storm and thundered its approval, my 
 regrets returned manifold. Let me know when you 
 are coming in, that I may secure tickets for you : 
 the house is selling out now several days ahead, 
 and we are turning hundreds of people away 
 every night. Hooray! 
 
 I want very much to come out to Washington* 
 for a day or two next week. ... Be prepared to 
 show me some nice hill-farms, which can be 
 bought for a little money. I am looking for one. 
 
 Yours, 
 
 W. V. M. 
 
 In the spring of 1908, while living in rooms he had 
 taken at 107 Waverly Place, New York, Moody was 
 prostrated by a severe and prolonged attack of typhoid 
 fever, from which his health never completely recov- 
 ered. His hitherto stalwart constitution seemed broken 
 and all work was hampered by a languor peculiarly 
 hard for his active nature to endure. He was devotedly 
 nursed by his friend of many years standing, Mrs. 
 Harriet Brainerd, of Chicago, whom he married in 
 1909. The chief literary work of this time of broken 
 health was the revision of "The Faith-Healer" for 
 performance in January, 1910, and the drafting of the 
 ^ Washington, Connecticut. 
 162 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 first act of "The Death of Eve," intended to complete 
 the trilogy of poetic dramas, but never finished. He 
 died October 17, 1910, at Colorado Springs. 
 
 To Henry Miller 
 
 Hotel Pontchartrain. 
 Detroit, Jan. 23rd, 1909. 
 My dear Mr. Miller, 
 
 I saw the performance ["The Great Divide"] 
 this afternoon for the first time in many months, 
 and I am forced to protest against the way in 
 which the character of Philip has been gradually, 
 but at last in the end totally, changed, both in 
 spirit and significance. It is now played as a 
 comedy part, and the whole effort is spent upon 
 the attempt to wring the words and action, willy- 
 nilly, into the guise of comic relief. I need hardly 
 point out to you that this is to deprive the play 
 of an essential element and to very seriously 
 damage it thereby. 
 
 I make this statement with extreme unwilling- 
 ness, but I feel that I must do so both in fairness 
 to myself and in the interest of the play's future 
 integrity. 
 
 Believe me. Very sincerely yours, 
 
 Wm. Vaughn Moody. 
 
 163 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 To Henry Miller 
 
 2970 Groveland Ave. 
 
 Chicago, Jan. 29, '09. 
 Dear Mr. Miller, 
 
 I have not written before about the proposed 
 change in the first act of the Great Divide, first 
 because I have been again in bad health, but 
 chiefly because I wanted to think it over from 
 every point of view and see if it would ''hold 
 water" everywhere. I am now convinced, for my 
 own part, that it is all right. The change is so 
 slight and obvious a one that you will probably 
 be skeptical at first of its efficacy, and in any case 
 you will be surprised that it has not hitherto 
 occurred to us. It is, in a word, simply to omit 
 from the first act all mention of marriage. Ruth 
 says merely "Save me, and I will make it up to 
 you" (of course the dialogue here will have to be 
 somewhat changed, but remains in substance the 
 same, with the exception noted). She does not 
 read the letter out, and its contents do not emerge 
 until the second act. He speaks of reaching San 
 Jacinto before daylight, but there is no mention 
 of marriage there, although by this time and in 
 the dialogue which follows it becomes clear (with- 
 
 r64 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 out any overt expression at all, and without any 
 change) that marriage is in his mind. He reads 
 (to himself) the note which she leaves for her 
 brother, and it is here that the idea of marriage 
 begins to take firm shape in his mind, but I do 
 not think that the subject ought to be discussed 
 or even broached between them. In the second 
 act it is made clear that they were married on the 
 very night of the attack, at San Jacinto, and the 
 rest of the play goes on without change. What do 
 you think? I have rewritten the first act on these 
 lines, have criticivsed the result from every stand- 
 point, and I firmly believe that the vexatious and 
 long-standing problem is solved at last. 
 
 I have also made some verbal changes (chiefly 
 omissions) in both the first and second acts, the 
 reasons for which I will explain at length when I 
 see you. I shall also tighten up the encounter 
 between Ghent and Philip in Act iii, so as to 
 make of it a real menace on the brother's part. 
 
 I am unable to send you the revised manu- 
 script at this moment, as I was forced by certain 
 sudden complications in the matter of printing 
 the book to send on the only copy I had to 
 Houghton, Mifflin. This will be returned to me 
 soon, when I shall forward it promptly to you. I 
 
 165 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 have also been too ill to get in shape the detailed 
 criticisms of the acting which I jotted down in 
 Detroit, but as the company is to be practically 
 re-made for England perhaps there is nothing to 
 be gained by badgering the present actors with 
 minute criticism. What do you think? 
 
 My doctor threatens, if I don't do better, to 
 ship me off to Southern California. I hope this 
 won't be necessary, or if necessary that I can get 
 back in due season to watch the rehearsals of the 
 Faith-Healer. Sincerely yours, 
 
 W. V. Moody. 
 
 To Henry Miller 
 
 2970 Groveland Ave. 
 Chicago, Feb. ist, '09. 
 Dear Mr. Miller, 
 
 I have been doing very badly in health of late 
 and am under doctor's orders to go to Southern 
 California at once, on pain of a breakdown. This 
 is very annoying to me, as I fear it will be also to 
 you, but there is no getting round it. I have given 
 orders to Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 4 Park St., Bos- 
 ton, to forward to your New York office promptly 
 the proof-sheets of ''The Great Divide," which 
 will place before you my mature ideas concerning 
 
 166 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 the changes already mentioned to you. Of course 
 you are under no obligation to adopt them, but I 
 hope that before rejecting any of them in favor of 
 the old version you will give each change or omis- 
 sion your serious consideration. The slight (but I 
 think important) changes in the second act are in 
 the direction of softening the harsh asperity of 
 Ruth's tone; also in one case (the omission of the 
 lines : "Funny, ain't it — Well, I take my punish- 
 ment" etc. "What are these papers?" "Plans 
 for a sheep-corral ") to soften the harshness of 
 Ghent's tone, which I think at this point grates on 
 the nerves unduly. In the third act the only change 
 of any importance is in the scene between Philip and 
 Ghent, where I have tried to put some real menace 
 into Philip's attack. If the stage directions are 
 followed here, I feel sure the scene — and thereby 
 the whole act — will be greatly strengthened. 
 
 Please, please persuade whoever plays Ruth in 
 London to put love into Act ii. Miss Lawton 
 plays it without one hint of tenderness and 
 smothered affection (or rather affection battling 
 with pride), and in consequence her yielding to 
 Ghent at the close of the play seems unconvincing 
 — a mere theatrical forced note for the "happy 
 ending," instead of seeming, as it really is, the 
 
 167 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 final releasing of the flood-gates of her love. This 
 is really, as you feel as strongly as I do, the 
 master-note of the play. It has never been truly 
 rendered, and at present it is not even suggested. 
 This may sound like harsh criticism, but it is 
 nevertheless gospel truth. 
 
 One thing more. I beg you to reconsider the 
 stage business at the very close of Act i (I mean 
 where Ghent raises his hand and points, and 
 Ruth goes past him cringing with bent head). 
 This seems to me melodramatic and false in its 
 effect — it is quite out of key with Ghent's simple, 
 straightforward, unmelodramatic character, and 
 also with the girl's corresponding qualities. Please 
 think of this. Also, I think the expression of Ghent's 
 sorrow at the close of Act ii is now over-done. 
 
 I think that his bursting into violent and 
 audible grief alienates rather than wins the sym- 
 pathy of the audience. You will forgive me for 
 these frank criticisms. You asked me for them. 
 
 I am sorry to inflict so long a letter upon you, 
 but as my future is uncertain in the matter of 
 health and whereabouts, I felt impelled to set 
 these things down. Any word you can send me to 
 my Los Angeles address, will be gratefully received ; 
 
 1 68 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 I am anxious to keep in touch with your plans. 
 Sincerely yours, 
 
 Wm. Vaughn Moody. 
 
 To Mrs. C. H. Toy 
 
 107 Waverly Place, 
 New York, Feb. 17 [1909.] 
 Dear Mrs. Toy, 
 
 . . . The new play [**The Faith-Healer"], of 
 which you say you have heard, is a queerish thing, 
 at the antipodes from this one ["The Great 
 Divide"] in method and feeling. . . . 
 
 The thing I have most at heart just now is a 
 poetic — I mean a verse — play. I have got a 
 grand idea, and keep feeling my muscle to see if I 
 am up to doing it, thus far with rather discourag- 
 ing responses from my system. Also, I am torn 
 between the ideal aspect of the theme and the 
 stage necessities — the old, old problem. Per- 
 haps in the end I will let the stage go to ballyhoo, 
 and write the thing as I see it, for that justly 
 lighted and managed stage of the mind, where 
 there are no bad actors and where the peanut- 
 eating of the public is reduced to a discreet mini- 
 mum. But this — after all — is an uncourageous 
 compromise. . . . 
 
 169 
 
SOME LETTERS OF 
 
 [To Henry Miller] 
 
 Messrs. Brown, Shipley & Co.*s 
 
 Travellers' Office. 
 123, Pall Mall, London, S.W. 
 July 10, '09. 
 Dear Miller, 
 
 Your friendly telegram, letting me know the 
 date of your arrival in London and inviting me 
 to be present at the opening of the Divide, reached 
 me yesterday. I have been meaning to write to 
 you, to tell you how good the prospect looks to 
 me here for the play, also to apologize to you for 
 keeping mum at Sky Meadows this spring con- 
 cerning my prospective marriage. The reason for 
 my keeping quiet was — of course — my desire 
 to prevent any inkling of the event from reaching 
 the newspapers before we were safely on ship- 
 board. Not that you would not have been discre- 
 tion itself but one is always nervous in these 
 matters. As it turned out, our precautions seem 
 to have proved excessive, with the result that my 
 mail swarms with inquiry from anxious friends. 
 Cards of announcement after the fact are printed, 
 and will I hope soon comfort these troubled 
 breasts. 
 
 As to your invitation to be present at the open- 
 170 
 
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 ing of the play, it greatly tempts me, and perhaps 
 my desires will prevail over my prudence; but 
 the fact is that my health has been and is wretched, 
 and the doctors warn me that if I do not take 
 great care just now I will rue it. The work which 
 I did on the Faith-Healer, together with the 
 excitement attending its production, came too 
 soon after my typhoid convalescence. In conse- 
 quence I broke down badly after reaching 
 London, and have been extremely ill since, with 
 symptoms of typhoid relapse well known to the 
 doctors and very grimly regarded by them. Now 
 I am better, and gaining steadily, but the wise- 
 acres say that the only place for me — for a year 
 — is a farm, and that any excitement which I 
 allow myself is at my peril. Anyhow, I shall be 
 here in spirit, and I cannot help feeling that the 
 prospect for a substantial success is good, in fact 
 excellent. . . . 
 
 With earnest good wishes, I am 
 
 Sincerely yours, 
 
 W. V. Moody. 
 
 THE END 
 
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 U . S . A 
 
OCT ]3 1913 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 015 973 493 6