Let not the gentle reader imagine from this enumeration than we are going to be so tedious as to divide the remainder of this article into heads, and to treat of each one of these kinds of letters in its turn. No; our object is, by indicating thus the number of sorts, to elucidate the importance of letters, and to prove that, if their writing be not, like that of poetry, ranked among the fine arts, it well deserves to be. For what more admirable accomplishment can there be—what is of more importance often than the proper composing of letters? Many a reputation is made or marred by a single epistle. Great consequences follow in the train of a single epistle. The pen is mightier than the sword. How well may our readers remember one brief letter of Henry Clay (clarum et venerabile nomen!), who, when a candidate for the Presidency, wrote many excellent letters, and too many—so many, indeed, that his adversaries indulged in pointless ridicule, and called him 'The Complete Letter Writer.' We allude, of course, to that brief letter to certain importunate individuals in Alabama, which lost for him the decisive and final vote of New York, and made Mr. Polk President—its consequences being the war with Mexico, the acquisition and annexation of California, the discovery of the gold mines—working an utter change in the political and commercial fortunes of the world, which would probably never have taken place, or, at least, not in our century, but for that one brief Alabama letter! It is, we believe, fully conceded that the safest rule for becoming Chief Magistrate of our country is never to write a letter.
Many a man and woman, who has written a letter and posted it, wishes ardently that it could be recalled; and many a one who has something disagreeable to say, and is obliged to say it in a letter because he has promised to write, wishes that he could send the letter in blank—like Larry O'Branigan to his wife Judy, when he was constrained to inform her that he had been dismissed from his place, thus done into verse by the bard of Erin:
'As it was but last week that I sent you a letter,
You'll wonder, dear Judy, what this is about,
And, troth, it's a letter myself would like better,
Could I manage to leave the contents of it out.'
Excellent, by the way, as this Hibernicism is, it is not so perfect as the following, which it would be difficult for the most accomplished of Paddies to surpass. A man, dying, wrote an epistle, in which, stating that he was near death, he took an affectionate farewell of his friends. He left the letter open on a table near him, and expired before he had time to complete it. His attendant, just after his demise, taking up the defunct's pen, in which the ink was scarcely yet dry, added, by way of postcript, or rather post-mortem-script: 'Since writing the foregoing, I have died.'
There is more philosophy than one would at first imagine in the apology of him who said that his pen was so bad it could not spell correctly. To write a letter as it should be in all respects, to be what it ought to be, orthographically, grammatically, rhetorically right, there should be a good pen, good paper, good ink. Many a pleasant correspondence has been marred by want of these adjuncts; many an agreeable thought arrested; many a composition, happily begun, hurried to an abrupt conclusion. And how many delightful letters have been omitted or neglected to be written by their want! We are not jesting. These concomitants, together with nice envelopes, are as requisite to a respectable epistle as becoming costume is to a lady. When we see a scrawling hand on coarse paper, ill folded, worse directed, and ending, 'Yours in haste,' we think but little of the writer. Such a one may complain of being in a hurry, but ladies and gentlemen should always take time to do well whatsoever they do at all. No letters should be written 'in haste' except angry ones, and the faster they are 'committed to paper' the better. We have found it a capital plan, when in hot wrath, to sit directly down and scratch off a furious letter, and then, having thus committed our ire to the paper, to commit that to the flames. The process is highly refrigerant, in any state of the weather.
Nothing can be more false than the phraseology of most letters. Many a letter is commenced with 'dear,' when the writer, if he dared express his real sentiment, would use a very opposite word. But, be the sentiments of a letter what they may, true or false, real or affected, it is the desire of the present writer to insist upon the indispensable neatness of letters—that they should be externally faultless, however defective inside. We regret to record the unpleasant fact that our American ladies seldom write good hands, whereas a fair chirography is properly considered as among the very first accomplishments for a well-educated girl in England. Who ever saw a letter from a true English lady that was not faultless in its details? What nice, legible penmanship! How happily expressed! How trim and pretty a cover! How beautiful and classic a seal! Very different these from the concomitants of half a sheet of ruled paper, scrawled over as if chickens had been walking upon it, and folded slopingly, and held loosely together by a wafer!
It is an affectation of many lawyers and most literary people to write ill, probably to create an impression that such is the vast importance of their occupations and lucubrations that they have not time to attend to so minor a matter as penmanship. A certain highly distinguished counsellor of Massachusetts was said to have written so badly that he could not comprehend his own legal opinions after he had put them on paper. Now such affectation is in very poor taste. Those who cannot write fairly and legibly had better go to school and practise until they can. Incomprehensible writing is as bad as incomprehensible speaking. A clear enunciation is scarcely more important than a plain hand. A lawyer, in speaking, may as well jumble his words so together that not one in fifty can be understood, as in writing to scrawl and run them about so that not one in fifty can be read.
What a world of content or of unhappiness lies within the little fold of a letter! Hark! There is the postman's ring at the door, sharp, quick, imperative; as much as to say, 'Don't, keep me standing here; I'm in a hurry.' How your heart beats! It has come at length—the long-expected letter; an answer to a proposal of marriage, perhaps; a reply to an urgent inquiry concerning a matter of business; information with regard to some near and dear relative; a bulletin from the field of battle; what the heart sighs for, hopes for—fears, yet welcomes—desires, yet dreads. You seize the letter. Has it a black seal? Yes? The blood leaves your cheeks and rushes to its citadel, frozen with fear, and in your ear sounds the knell of a departed joy. No? Then you heave a long sigh of relief, and gaze for a moment at the missive, wondering from whom it can be. Your doubts are soon resolved, and you rest satisfied or you are disappointed. Recall the emotions which you have experienced in opening and reading many a letter, and you will acknowledge that fate and fortune often announce their happiest or sternest decrees through a little sheet of folded paper. Have you not thought so, wife, when came the long looked-for, long hoped-for, long prayed-for—with so many sighs and tears, such throbbing, and such sinking of the heart—letter from your husband, telling the fruition of his schemes, and the prospect of his speedy return? Have you not thought so, mother, when your son's letter came, assuring you that your early teachings had been blessed to him; and, though perchance surrounded by the temptations of a great city or a great camp, he had found that 'peace which passeth understanding?' Have you not thought so, O happy damsel—yes! that blush tells how deeply—when his letter came at last, that letter which told you you were beloved, and that all his future felicity depended upon your reply? And that soft reply—how covered with kisses, how worn in that pocket of the coat in which it can feel the beatings of the precordial region! And not of you alone, ye refined and accomplished lovers—but of swains and sweethearts are the letters dear. Nothing more prized than such epistles, commencing with: 'This comes to inform you that I am well, saving a bad cold, and hope you enjoy the same blessing,' and ending:
'My pen is poor, my ink is pale,
My love for you shall never fail.'
Assuredly, if there can be unalloyed happiness in this world, it appertains to those dear and distant friends, parted from one another by intervening ocean or continent, at those moments of mental communion which are vouchsafed by long and loving letters. Ah, how would the bands of friendship weaken and drop apart if it were not for them! They brighten the links of our social affections; they freshen the verdure of kind thoughts; they are like the morning dew and the evening rain to filial, conjugal, fraternal, paternal and parental love!