I shall write to Hillard soon. I have been reading his book half the time today and with very great pleasure. I am delighted with the plan of it—practical information such as the traveller that is to be or that has been wishes for, with poetical description enough to keep the imagination alive, and sound American thought to give it manly substance. It is anything but a flash book, but I have not the slightest doubt that it will have a permanent and very high place in travelling literature. Many things have pleased me exceedingly,—when I have read a little more I shall try to tell him what pleases me most,—as I suppose like most authors he likes as many points for his critical self-triangulation as will come unasked for.
Hawthorne’s book has been not devoured, but bolted by my children. I have not yet had a chance at it, but I don’t doubt I shall read it with as much gusto as they, when my turn comes. When you write to him, thank him if you please for me, for I suppose he will hardly expect any formal acknowledgment.
I bloomed out into a large smile of calm delight on opening the delicate little “Epistle Dedicatory” wherein your name is embalmed. I cannot remember that our friend has tried that pace before; he wrote some pleasing lines I remember to Longfellow on the ship in which he was to sail when he went to Europe some years—a good many—ago.
Don’t be too proud! Wait until you get a prose dedication from a poet,—if you have not got one already,—and then consider yourself immortal.
Yours most truly,
O. W. Holmes
AN EARLY PHOTOGRAPH OF DR. HOLMES
This letter contains several provocations to curiosity. “Aleck, ... the most illustrious of all the Smiths,” was obviously Alexander Smith, the Scottish poet of enormous but strictly contemporaneous vogue, in whom the English reviewers of the time detected a kinship to Tennyson, Keats, Shelley, and Shakespeare. George S. Hillard’s new book was “Six Months in Italy,” and Hawthorne’s, “not devoured, but bolted” by the Holmes children, was “Tanglewood Tales.” The “delicate little ‘Epistle Dedicatory’” has been found elusive.