So all your form is flowin’ in perfect harmony.
I hear de epigramme in your sehr piquant replies,
I hear de sonnets soundin’ ven your accents fall and rise,
And if I look upon you, vote’er I feel or see,
De voice and form and motion is all one melody.
Du bist die Ideale of efery mortal ding,
Ven poets reach de perfect—dey need no longer sing
Das Beste sei das Letzte—de last is pest indeed!
Brich Herz und Laut! zusammen—dies ist mein letztes Lied!
Leland was an enormous man, with a long, shaggy beard. He came from Pennsylvania, where he was born in 1824, but lived the greater part of his life on this side of the water. He was full of good stories: knew Oliver Wendell Holmes, Talleyrand, J. R. Lowell, Emerson, and others of that ilk. Our sympathy lay, however, in his love of the gipsies (about whom he wrote so much that to his friends he was known as “The Rye”), also in his affection for and knowledge of Germany, so that when I came back from that country a first-class chatterbox in the Teuton tongue, and ready to shake school-days from my feet, he wrote me that I “looked like a gipsy and talked German like a backfish.”