N. Y. Journal Office,Washington, D. C.,October 21,1903.
I'm indebted to you for two letters awfully good ones. In the last you tell me that your health is better, and I can see for myself that your spirits are. This you attribute to exercise, correctly, no doubt. You need a lot of the open air we all do. I can give myself hypochondria in forty-eight hours by staying in-doors. The sedentary life and abstracted contemplation of one's own navel are good for Oriental gods only. We spirits of a purer fire need sunlight and the hills. My own recent wanderings afoot and horseback
in the mountains did me more good than a sermon. And you have "the hills back of Oakland"! God, what would I not give to help you range them, the dear old things! Why, I know every square foot of them from Walnut Creek to Niles Cañon. Of course they swarm with ghosts, as do all places out there, even the streets of San Francisco; but I and my ghosts always get on well together. With the female ones my relations are sometimes a bit better than they were with the dear creatures when they lived.
I guess I did not acknowledge the splendidly bound "Shapes" that you kindly sent, nor the Jack London books. Much thanks.
I'm pleased to know that Wood expects to sell the whole edition of my book, but am myself not confident of that.
So we are to have your book soon. Good, but I don't like your indifference to its outward and visible aspect. Some of my own books have offended, and continue to offend, in that way. At best a book is not too beautiful; at worst it is hideous. Be advised a bit by Scheff in this matter; his taste seems to me admirable and I'm well pleased by his work on the "Shapes"; even his covers, which I'm sorry to learn do not please Wood, appear to me excellent. I approved the design before he executed it in fact chose it from several that he submitted. Its only fault seems to me too much gold leaf, but that is a fault "on the right side." In that and all the rest of the work (except my own) experts here are delighted. I gave him an absolutely free hand and am glad I did. I don't like the ragged leaves, but he does not either, on second thought. The public the reading public I fear does, just now.
I'll get at your new verses in a few days. It will be, as always it is, a pleasure to go over them.
About "Prattle." I should think you might get help in that matter from Oscar T. Schuck, 2916 Laguna St. He used to suffer from "Prattle" a good deal, but is very friendly, and the obtaining it would be in the line of his present business.
How did you happen to hit on Markham's greatest two lines but I need not ask that from "The Wharf of Dreams"?
Well, I wish I could think that those lines of mine in "Geotheos" were worthy to be mentioned with Keats' "magic casements" and Coleridge's "woman wailing for her demon lover." But I don't think any lines of anybody are. I laugh at myself to remember that Geotheos, never before in print I believe, was written for E. L. G. Steele to read before a "young ladies' seminary" somewhere in the cow counties! Like a man of sense he didn't read it. I don't share your regret that I have not devoted myself to serious poetry. I don't think of myself as a poet, but as a satirist; so I'm entitled to credit for what little gold there may be in the mud I throw. But if I professed gold-throwing, the mud which I should surely mix with the missiles would count against me. Besides, I've a preference for being the first man in a village, rather than the second man in Rome. Poetry is a ladder on which there is now no room at the top unless you and Scheff throw down some of the chaps occupying the upper rung. It looks as if you might, but I could not. When old Homer, Shakspeare and that crowd building better than Ozymandias say: "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" I, considering myself specially addressed, despair. The challenge of the wits does not alarm me.
If you say: "There is no hope or fear" you say that one of them does not exist. In saying: "There is no hope nor fear" you say that both do not exist which is what you mean.
"Not to weary you, I shall say that I fetched the book from his cabin." Whether that is preferable to "I will say" depends on just what is meant; both are grammatical. The "shall" merely indicates an intention to say; the "will" implies a certain shade of concession in saying it.
It is no trouble to answer such questions, nor to do anything else to please you. I only hope I make it clear.
I don't know if all my "Journal" work gets into the "Examiner," for I don't see all the issues of either paper. I'm not writing much anyhow. They don't seem to want much from me, and their weekly check is about all that I want from them.
talked with dozens of men whom it did cure.
You'll die of consumption if you don't. Twenty-odd years ago I was writing articles on the out-of-doors treatment for consumption. Now only just now the physicians are doing the same, and establishing out-of-door sanitaria for consumption.