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asked his friend to throw a copy of ‘Endymion’ into the heart of the African desert; is it not better to cast your book into a vaster region that is alive with men?
Cliques lose their seeming importance where one has the human heart at his door.
That calamity which Fontenelle mourned, the loss of so many good things by their being spoken only into the ear of some fool, can never happen to what is written for a whole continent.
There will be a good auditor somewhere, and the farther off, the more encouraging.
When your sister or your neighbor praises your work, they may be suspected of partiality; when the newspapers commend, the critic may be very friendly or very juvenile; but when the post brings you a complimentary letter from a new-born village in Colorado, you become conscious of an audience.
Now, suppose the intellectual aspirations of that frontier village to be so built up by schools, libraries, and galleries that it shall be a centre of thought and civilization for the whole of Colorado,—a State which is in itself about the size of Great Britain or Italy, and half the size of Germany or France,—and we
Boston, Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1892.
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