Yours fraternally,
Hamilton W. Mabie.
The second is from Sir George Douglas, poet, scholar, and keen critic:
Springwood Park, Kelso,
23:12:95.
My dear Sharp,
Many thanks for your interesting letter and enclosures. I am very glad to find that you think I have understood Miss Macleod’s work, and I think it very good of her to have taken my out-spoken criticisms in such good part. Certainly if she thinks I can be of any use to her in reading over the proofs of “The Washer of the Ford,” it will be a great pleasure to me. I shall probably be in Italy by the time she names—the end of Feb. but in these days of swift posts I hope that need not matter. What you tell me of Fiona’s admirer is very interesting, and from my recollection of the way in which books and the fancied personality of their authors possessed my mind when I was a youth, I can well enter into his infatuation. Fortunately there were no women among my “influences,” or I might have been in as bad a case as he! Would not this be a case for telling the secret, under pledges of course, if it were only to prevent mischief? By the way the whole incident seems to me to afford excellent material for literary treatment—not by you perhaps, nor yet by me (for the literary element in the material puts it outside your province, and makes it not quite the theme I like for my own use either) but say, for W.
Yours ever sincerely,
George Douglas.
I do not quite agree with you as to the inception of Miss Macleod, and possibly this is a matter in which you are not the best possible judge. At any rate, without going into the matter, I fancy that I could establish the existence in works earlier than the Poems of Phantasy of a certain mystical tendency, (German perhaps rather than Celtic in its colouring at that time) but none the less akin to the mysticisms of F. M.