previous next
[207]

In the delicate and touching dedication of Scudder's chief work, “Men and letters,” to his friend Henry M. Alden, the well-known New York editor, he says: “In that former state of existence when we were poets, you wrote verses which I knew by heart and I read dreamy tales to you which you speculated over as if they were already classics. Then you bound your manuscript verses in a full blue calf volume and put it on the shelf, and I woke to find myself at the desk of a literary workman.” Later, he says of himself, “Fortunately, I have been able for the most part to work out of the glare of publicity.” Yet even to this modest phrase he adds acutely: “But there is always that something in us which whispers I, and after a while the anonymous critic becomes a little tired of listening to the whisper in his solitary cave, and is disposed to escape from it by coming out into the light even at the risk of blinking a little, and by suffering the ghostly voice to become articulate, though the sound startle him. One craves company for his thought, and is not quite content always to sit in the dark with his guests.”

The work in which he best achieves the purpose last stated is undoubtedly the collection of papers called by the inexpressive phrase “Men and letters” ; a book whose title was perhaps a weight upon it, and which yet contained

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
David Coit Scudder (1)
Henry M. Alden (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: