XXVI
LITERARY WELL-WISHERS—GEORGE D. PRENTICE—MRS. SIGOURNEY—GRACE GREENWOOD—H. W. LONGFELLOW—JAMES REDPATH—“THE WANDERING JEW”
Authors were not so plentiful then as to attract no attention in a crowd of non-literary people. Men and women who had climbed the heights had leisure to glance down at those nearer the foot of the hill, and to send back a cheering hail. I had twenty letters from George D. Prentice, known of all men as the friend and helper of youthful writers. All were kind and encouraging. By-and-by, they were fatherly and familiar. As when I lamented that I had never been able to make my head work without my heart, he responded, “Hearts without heads are too impulsive, sometimes too hot. Heads without hearts are too cold. Suppose you settle the matter by giving the heart into my keeping, in trust for the happy man who will call for it some day?”
His letters during the war were tinged with sadness. In one he wrote: “My whole heart is one throbbing prayer to the God of Nations that He will have mercy upon my beloved country.”
In reply to a letter of sympathy after the death of a gallant young son, who fell on the battle-field, he said:
“My dear boy never gave me a pang except by entering the army (in obedience to what he felt was the call of duty), and in dying. A nobler, more dutiful son never gladdened a father’s heart.”
Our correspondence was continued as long as the poet-editor lived. I owe him much. I wish I had made him comprehend how much.
Mrs. Sigourney, then on “the retired list” of American authors, sent me a copy of her latest volume of poems—A Western Home—and three or four letters of motherly counsel, one of which advised me to take certain epochs of American history as foundation-stones for any novels I might write in future, and bidding me “God-speed!”