20 INTR OD UC TION
Think of these things. Perhaps I am wrong, after all, in supposing that your book is so little known. If so, accuse my unfortunate position here, getting a precarious livelihood out of a commercial community, whose spirit, perhaps, infects me a little, much as I loathe it. Write to me when you have time, and believe me ever
Your sincere friend,
S. CoNANT Foster.
59 West 35TH St.
��The few letters already quoted, the only ones which have been preserved, are not the sole record of the impression made at the time by the mingled tenderness and austerity of these poems, in which the love of beauty, the reverence for goodness, and the passion for truth seem contending for the mastery, yet in which there is manifest an almost fierce contempt for meretricious ornament. Among the papers intrusted to me is a retained copy of an undated letter, marked on the outside in the poet's handwriting — "From J. W. R. to Mr. Bryant." This letter is so charac- teristic, so proud and yet so shy, so suggestive of the solitude in which the writer spent his life, that it belongs here.
Respected Sir,
The esteem which from my youth up I have entertained for your printed poems induces me to ask your acceptance of the little book which accompanies this note, and which a friend kindly offers to place in your hands. I do not know that any apology for so doing is necessary, believing that the motive above suggested has been always accepted
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