At last the autumn came to an end. We felt the first breath of winter standing by the river side, where Tom Moore wrote his famous Canadian Boat Song—the woods were a glory of crimson and gold.
We said good-bye to Canada and turned our footsteps to New York. There we met a warm-hearted American welcome. Our numerous friends seemed to find an almost personal gratification in the fact that we had been to the Far North-West and to the Far East, to the Pacific Coast and to Japan and China.
I was now no longer exclusively the “Australian Poet,” I was a sort of mild explorer, and people talked Japan to me whenever they were not talking about themselves. There was a good deal of this to do, because I had a commission from Griffith, Farran & Co. to compile a book on the younger American Poets, and nearly every one I met seemed to be a poet.
I was sitting next to H. M. Alden, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, one night at dinner. Suddenly he pulled out his watch. “It is now nine o’clock,” he said; “at this moment there are a hundred thousand people in America writing poetry, and most of them will send it to me.”
One of them was the English curate of the most fashionable church in New York, and he was in a quandary. He wished to be in the book, but he had heard that there was to be a biography of each poet, giving his date of birth, parentage, career, etc. He did not wish his date of birth to be known—he thought that it would interfere with his prospects as a lady-killer. “Was it compulsory for him to say how old he was?” he whined.
“You need not tell the truth about it,” I suggested.
In the compilation of that book I saw a great deal of human nature, because I met the poets, whereas in Australian Poets, which I edited simultaneously, I had to do my work entirely by correspondence.
We spent a delightful winter and spring in New York, because we had Miss Lorimer’s beautiful sister, Mrs. Hay-Chapman, one of the finest amateur pianists I ever heard, staying with us all the time, so that we had a feast of music, and as I was doing literary and dramatic criticisms for the Dominion Illustrated, the leading weekly of Canada, we had plenty of new books and theatre tickets. This, and the articles on Japan I was writing for the American Press and McClure’s Syndicate, kept me quite busy.
My sojourn in America had a most important influence on my literary career, because it taught me my trade as a journalist. Needing money, and having no connections, I had to make my way as a journalistic free lance in the open market, and I succeeded in making a fair income out of it.
But I never tried to get a publisher (though one came to me), for the simple reason that I never contemplated entering the lists as a prose-writer. A large and well-known firm bought editions in sheets of my various volumes of verse, which surprised me very much, till they went bankrupt shortly afterwards without paying for them. The purchase was not of sufficient magnitude to be the cause of the bankruptcy, as the ill-natured might suggest.