’If the public were a perfect instrument to strike on, I should be tempted to take the wonderful success of my Princess at her first appearance for a proof of natural aptitude in composition, and might think myself the genius.  I know it to be as little a Stradivarius as I am a Paganini.  It is an eccentric machine, in tune with me for the moment, because I happen to have hit it in the ringing spot.  The book is a new face appealing to a mirror of the common surface emotions; and the kitchen rather than the dairy offers an analogy for the real value of that “top-skim.”  I have not seen what I consider good in the book once mentioned among the laudatory notices—­except by your dear hand, my Emmy.  Be sure I will stand on guard against the “vaporous generalizations,” and other “tricks” you fear.  Now that you are studying Latin for an occupation—­how good and wise it was of Mr. Redworth to propose it!—­ I look upon you with awe as a classic authority and critic.  I wish I had leisure to study with you.  What I do is nothing like so solid and durable.

‘The Princess Egeria’ originally (I must have written word of it to you—­ I remember the evening off Palermo!) was conceived as a sketch; by gradations she grew into a sort of semi-Scudery romance, and swelled to her present portliness.  That was done by a great deal of piecing, not to say puffing, of her frame.  She would be healthier and have a chance of living longer if she were reduced by a reversal of the processes.  But how would the judicious clippings and prickings affect our “pensive public”?  Now that I have furnished a house and have a fixed address, under the paws of creditors, I feel I am in the wizard-circle of my popularity and subscribe to its laws or waken to incubus and the desert.  Have I been rash?  You do not pronounce.  If I have bound myself to pipe as others please, it need not be entirely; and I can promise you it shall not be; but still I am sensible when I lift my “little quill” of having forced the note of a woodland wren into the popular nightingale’s—­which may end in the daw’s, from straining; or worse, a toy-whistle.

’That is, in the field of literature.  Otherwise, within me deep, I am not aware of any transmutation of the celestial into coined gold.  I sound myself, and ring clear.  Incessant writing is my refuge, my solace—­escape out of the personal net.  I delight in it, as in my early morning walks at Lugano, when I went threading the streets and by the lake away to “the heavenly mount,” like a dim idea worming upward in a sleepy head to bright wakefulness.

’My anonymous critic, of whom I told you, is intoxicating with eulogy.  The signature “Apollonius” appears to be of literary-middle indication.  He marks passages approved by you.  I have also had a complimentary letter from Mr. Dacier: