“Indeed! How pleasant that must be! Long as I have lived near him, I have never seen him.”
“We shall quarrel here and now if you do not at once praise the Biglow Papers.”
“Oh! but I could not say too much of them. After their kind they stand alone.”
“Thank you! And how rare it is that the poets combine humor with the higher qualities! It is sadly true of our day.”
“Yes, yes! It is laughable to hear people talk of Browning’s humor. At times he is grotesque or sardonic—never delicately humorous or funny. We want a word in between fun and humor. And Tennyson is not humorous. It all seems a part of the gloom which has fallen on English letters.”
“Oh, there is ‘Plump head-waiter at the Cock’!”
“That is the exception, and is not very notable, like Lowell’s sustained and delightful verbal play; the rest are no better or worse off—the lesser larks, I mean.”
“Yes, and Shelley has no humor, and Keats’s attempts are only illustrations of the fact that editors don’t know where to draw the line.”
“How agreeable we are!” he said, laughing. He had the happy art of low-pitched laughter.
“That way of saying we agree,” she said, “would delight Aunt Anne.”