Stevenson approached close to the beau ideal of epistolary art.  When we and our friends have achieved it, distance will be annihilated and there will be no such thing as separation.  We shall draw from our little box a small white packet, and, though Nostradamus may offer us every secret of magician or alchemist in exchange for it, we shall refuse offhand.  How shall he lure us with a shadow, a ghostly visitant, savoring of the pit and summoned only by the most marrow-freezing incantations?  Here in our hand is a mysterious, more potent charm, bringing us the warm, human personality of the man.  We are not spiritualists, yet here sealed in the white packet is an incorporal presence.  Given but a mastery of the twenty-six signs and their combinations, and lo, the heart of our friend served up in Boston bond!  Then, as for enditing of letters, we shall rise up and call them blessed who have made “much ado about a little matter.”

Literary Monthly, 1901.

GREYLOCK

MAX EASTMAN ’05

  This whole, far-reaching host of ancient hills
  That all thy kingdom’s rugged boundary fills,
  Yields thee unrivalled thy supremacy. 
  ’Tis not by chance that they thus kneel to thee;
  Those scars, that but increase thy grandeur, tell
  Of battles thou hast fought—­and hast fought well,
  For, conquered at thy feet, two giants lie
  Who once did dare their sovereign to defy. 
  When earth with sea, and earth with earth, and sea
  With sea, all mingled, fought for mastery,
  Then didst thou meet thy foes, and by thy might
  Didst win, and since hath kept, thy regal right.

Literary Monthly, 1901.

TO SIDNEY LANIER

MAX EASTMAN ’05

  Thy name is not the highest in thy art,
    Though music sweet thou singest in thy songs
    That unto thee alone of all belongs,
  Uplifting Love in every burdened heart;

  Thou hast not left us perfect poetry;
    But thou hast left by far a greater thing,
    A poem such as man did never sing—­
  Thine own brave life, a lifelong victory.

Literary Monthly, 1902.

THE LIFTING OF THE CLOUDS

SHEPARD ASHMAN MORGAN ’06

All day long a reeking mist had been rolling across the valley, at times all but obscuring the Peak where it rose between its pair of flanking hills.  Sifting clouds had surged and seethed in the Cleft, as those who dwelt in its vicinity called the interval between the two hills and the loftier and more distant Peak, and rose now and then barely enough to reveal the greater mountain, but never yet had quite cleared the summit.  The mist had slimed the whole world with a coating of wet, and when the wind chanced to set the bare limbs of the trees to swaying, the drops would spatter on the ground and scarcely be absorbed, so waterlogged was the earth.