SOME LETTERS OF

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR'

I

1888

WAS first directed to Landor's works by hearing how much store Emerson set by

them. I grew acquainted with them fifty years ago in one of those arched alcoves in the old college library in Harvard Hall, which so pleasantly secluded without wholly isolating the student. That footsteps should pass across the mouth of his Aladdin's Cave, or even enter it in search of treasure, so far from disturbing only deepened his sense of possession. These faint rumors of the world he had left served but as a pleasant reminder that he was the privileged denizen of another, beyond "the flaming bounds of place and time." There, with my book lying at ease and in the expansion of intimacy on the broad window-shelf, shifting my cell from north to south with the season, I made friendships, that have lasted me for life, with Dodsley's "Old Plays," with Cotton's "Montaigne," with Hakluyt's "Voyages," among others that were not

• Written to introduce Landor's letters to the readers of The Century Magazine, in which they were first published.

in my father's library. It was the merest browsing, no doubt, as Johnson called it, but how delightful it was! All the more, I fear, because it added the stolen sweetness of truancy to that of study, for I should have been buckling to my allotted task of the day. I do not regret that diversion of time to other than legitimate expenses, yet shall I not gravely warn my grandsons to beware of doing the like?

I was far from understanding all I heard in this society of my elders into which I had smuggled myself, and perhaps it was as well for me; but those who formed it condescended to me at odd moments with the tolerant complacency of greatness, and I did not go empty away. Landor was in many ways beyond me, but I loved the company he brought, making persons for me of what before had been futile names, and letting me hear the discourse of men about whom Plutarch had so often told me such delightful stories. He charmed me, sometimes perhaps he imposed on me, with the stately eloquence that moved to measure always, often to music, and never enfeebled itself by undue emphasis, or raised its tone above the level of good breeding. In those ebullient years of my adolescence it was a wholesome sedative. His sententiousness, too, had its charm, equally persuasive in the carefully draped folds of the chlamys or the succinct tunic of epigram. If Plato had written in English, I