Friday, March 19th

BY AN ODD COINCIDENCE I came upon a paragraph from Ruskin’s A Joy Forever that I had been looking for for years. It turned up in an old journal I uncovered in a box of the books from Wright Street. The coincidence is that I found it this morning, with young Morgan Mead coming for lunch to celebrate his first story’s having sold to Yankee.

“For it is only the young,” Ruskin writes, “who can receive much reward from men’s praise; the old, when they are great, get too far beyond and above you to care what you think of them.

“You may urge them then with sympathy, and surround them with acclamation, but they will doubt your pleasure and despise your praise. You might have cheered them in their race through the asphodel meadows of their youth; you might have brought the proud bright scarlet to their faces, if you had but cried once to them. ‘Well done,’ as they dashed up to the first goal of their early ambition. But now their pleasure is in memory, and their ambition is in Heaven. They can be kind to you, but you can nevermore be kind to them.”

Of course, on the other hand, it is Heaven not to care, or to feel secure enough no longer to crave praise. I fear I never shall.

I was so afraid that I might not be wildly enthusiastic about Morgan’s story, but I was. I found it full of charm and truth; I feel he is a novelist—he manages in this short story to weave such a rich web, to evoke so much between the lines. It made me happy to be able to tell him this.

Altogether a lovely day, though it began with thick wet snow, nearly two inches, and I was awfully afraid he wouldn’t make it from Hartford. We are real friends in that we can talk about everything very freely and I know he enjoys me as much as I enjoy him. Our yearly meetings are true festivals. There are nearly forty years between us—amazing!