Grace Greenwood opened a correspondence with the younger woman who had admired her afar off, and we kept up the friendship until she went abroad to live, resuming our intercourse upon her return to New York in the early eighties.
From Mr. Longfellow I had two letters. One told me that Mrs. Longfellow was “reading Alone in her turn.”
“I am pleased to note upon the title-page of my copy, ‘Sixth Edition.’ That looks very like a guide-board pointing to Fame. I should think you would feel as does the traveller in the Tyrol who sees, at a turn in the rocky pass, a finger-post with the inscription—‘To Rome.’ Hoping that you will not be molested by the bandits who sometimes infest that route, I am sincerely yours,
Henry W. Longfellow.”
I have carried the letter, word for word, in my heart for more than half a century. A patent of nobility would not have brought me keener and more exquisite pleasure.
Not that I deceived myself, for one mad hour, with the fancy that I could ever gain the right to stand for one beatific moment on a level with the immortals whom I worshipped. In the first flush of my petty triumph, I felt my limitations. The appreciation of these has grown upon me with each succeeding year. “Fred” Cozzens, the “Sparrowgrass” of humorous literature, said to me once when I expressed something of this conviction:
“Yet you occupy an important niche.”
I replied in all sincerity: “I know my place. But the niche is small, and it is not high up. All that I can hope is to fill it worthily, such as it is.”
The history of one bulky packet of letters takes me back to the orderly progress of my story, and to the most singular and romantic episode of that first year of confessedly literary life.