I do not know that I have any printable stuff just now—­separatable stuff, that is—­but I shall have by and by.  It is very gratifying to hear that it is wanted by anybody.  I stand always prepared to hear the reverse, and am constantly surprised that it is delayed so long.  Consequently it is not going to astonish me when it comes.

The Clemens party enjoyed Heidelberg, though in different ways.  The children romped and picnicked in the castle grounds, which adjoined the hotel; Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding were devoted to bric-a-brac hunting, picture-galleries, and music.  Clemens took long walks, or made excursions by rail and diligence to farther points.  Art and opera did not appeal to him.  The note-book says: 

I have attended operas, whenever I could not help it, for fourteen years now; I am sure I know of no agony comparable to the listening to an unfamiliar opera.  I am enchanted with the airs of “Trovatore” and other old operas which the hand-organ and the music-box have made entirely familiar to my ear.  I am carried away with delighted enthusiasm when they are sung at the opera.  But oh, how far between they are!  And what long, arid, heartbreaking and headaching “between-times” of that sort of intense but incoherent noise which always so reminds me of the time the orphan asylum burned down.

Sunday night, 11th.  Huge crowd out to-night to hear the band play the “Fremersberg.”  I suppose it is very low-grade music—­I know it must be low-grade music—­because it so delighted me, it so warmed me, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me, enraptured me, that at times I could have cried, and at others split my throat with shouting.  The great crowd was another evidence that it was low-grade music, for only the few are educated up to a point where high-class music gives pleasure.  I have never heard enough classic music to be able to enjoy it, and the simple truth is I detest it.  Not mildly, but with all my heart.

What a poor lot we human beings are anyway!  If base music gives me wings, why should I want any other?  But I do.  I want to like the higher music because the higher and better like it.  But you see I want to like it without taking the necessary trouble, and giving the thing the necessary amount of time and attention.  The natural suggestion is, to get into that upper tier, that dress-circle, by a lie—­we will pretend we like it.  This lie, this pretense, gives to opera what support it has in America.

And then there is painting.  What a red rag is to a bull Turner’s “Slave Ship” is to me.  Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure as it throws me into one of rage.  His cultivation enables him to see water in that yellow mud; his cultivation reconciles the floating of unfloatable things to him—­chains etc.; it reconciles him to fishes swimming on top of the water.  The