I could not get it in right, but that will not hinder you from taking in that I am like to go
contrariwise. Besides, I know what you will miss if I do not write—enough to make you go into mourning, a bit of crape at your buttonhole. You don’t know what a Florence letter I wrote to you! Now, I am not given to self-praise; but I know the difference between still and sparkling catawba, glass and diamonds—stupidity and sparkle.
So I speak, “having authority”—that Florence letter, written to you long before I was up or the sun either; yes, just as Guercino’s maidens, fashioned of dusk and dawn, were beginning to put the stars out—that was a letter! Had it only have reached you, it would have thrown you into a fit of St. Vitus’ dance, or something equally demonstrative. I am a light sleeper, late to bed, later to sleep and early awake. I cannot get up ahead of all households, so I do not even hold in the fitful fancies, but let them have it all their own way. Such fascination as the habit is! I just snap my fingers at the frowning brows of Messrs. Abercrombie, Upham, Sir William Hamilton and all that cloud of accordant authorities on mental discipline. And for that letter, as for me, I did not have any more to do with its flash and fun and sauce and sparkle than one who sits on the sea-shore and watches the waves in a frolic, or as Longfellow says it for me:
“—— sits in revery and muses
Upon the changing colors of the waves that break
Upon the idle seashore of the mind.”
Ah! if you had only got that letter! Alas! and alas! it was never even put on paper. You do not know how sorry I am, though, that you can never, never see it, and read it, and pirouette over it, and maybe frame it and hang it up on your walls, to be a memorial of me forever and forever. Indeed, I did so want you to have a Florence letter, for you know somebody, Rogers maybe, says:
“Of all the fairest cities of the earth,
None is so fair as Florence.
—— Search within,
Without; all is enchantment!”