England
with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey
or its cathedral,
with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through
the transept—the
criterion of suitability and convenience: and Italy with
its equal
shores—contriving an epicureanism from which the
grossness has been
extracted: and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the
nest of modified illusions:
and France, the “chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly,” in
whose products, mystery of construction diverts one
from what was originally one’s
object—substance at the core: and the East with its snails,
its emotional
shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and
its imperturbability,
all of museum quality: and America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,
where cigars are smoked on the
street in the north; where there are no proofreaders,
no silkworms, no digressions;
the wild man’s land; grass-less, links-less, language-less
country in which letters are written
not in Spanish not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!
the letter “a” in psalm and calm when
pronounced with the sound of “a” in candle, is very
noticeable but