XXXII
Richard Haven to Verena Raby
Dearest Verena, your testimonial gave me extraordinary pleasure, and I wish it was true.
I don’t say, in spite of your charming piece of altruistic reasoning, that you are lucky to be in bed, but to have to remain in a remote rural spot while England is getting herself into order again is not a bad thing. For it is a slow and rather unlovely process. Just at the moment War seems, as one remembers it (and of course I speak only of England, not of the Front), a more desirable condition than Peace. There is no doubt that the country is a fit place for Profiteeroes to live in.
I felt sure that you knew Clifford’s excellent nonsense for the young. As you don’t know it, you shall; but not yet! A surprise is brewing.
With the steady assistance of my invaluable Miss Faith and her little Corona (which is not, alas! a cigar, but a typewriter) I have amassed already a collection of brief poems such as may gently occupy your thoughts in the wakeful sessions of the night. These I shall dole out to you, one by one, for you to take or leave as you feel “dispoged.” I have not gone beyond my own shelves, but if ever I find myself with the run of somebody else’s no doubt I shall find many more, probably equally good or even better. We might call it the Tabloid Treasury when it is ready?
Having sent you the other day all those elegiac efforts, I am now copying out three or four short poems where the poets take stock and prepare to put up the shutters, and here again the quality is high. The most famous example is, of course, Landor’s:
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.