With better fortunes when my first London book was out, I had taken rooms at Museum street, a few doors from the greatest storehouse of art and history on the globe, and I literally lived in the British Museum every day. But I had already overtaxed my strength, and my eyes were paining terribly. Never robust, I had always abhorred meat; and milk, from a child, had been my strongest drink. In the chill damp of London you must eat and drink. I was, without knowing it, starving and working myself to death. Always and wherever you are, when a hard bit of work is done, rest and refresh. Go to the fields, woods, to God and get strong. This is your duty as well as your right.

Letters-sweet, brave, good letters from the learned and great-were so many I could not read them with my poor eyes and had to leave them to friends. They found two from the Archbishop of Dublin. I was to breakfast with him to meet Browning, Dean Stanley, Houghton, and so on. I went to an old Jew close by to hire a dress suit, as Franklin had done for the Court of St. James. While fitting on the clothes I told him I was in haste to go to a great breakfast. He stopped, looked at me, looked me all over, and then told me I must not wear that, but he would hire me a suit of velvet. By degrees, as he fixed me up, he got at, or guessed at some facts, and when I asked to pay him he shook his head. I put some money down and he pushed it back. He said he had a son, his only family now, at Oxford, and he kept on fixing me up; cane, great, tall silk hat, gloves and all. Who would have guessed the heart to be found there?

Browning was just back from Italy, sunburnt and ruddy. "Robert, you are browning," smiled Lady Augusta. "And you are August-a," bowed the great poet grandly; and, by what coincidence -he, too, was in brown velvet, and so like my own that I was a bit uneasy.

Two of the Archbishop's beautiful daughters had been riding in the park with the Earl of Aberdeen. "And did you gallop?" asked Browning of the younger beauty. "I galloped, Joyce galloped, we galloped all three." Then we all laughed at the happy and hearty retort, and Browning, beating the time and clang of galloping horses' feet on the table with his fingers, repeated the exact measure in Latin from Virgil; and the Archbishop laughingly took it up, in Latin, where he left off. I then told Browning I had an order-it was my first-for a poem from the Oxford Magazine, and would like to borrow the measure and spirit of his " Good News" for a prairie fire on the plains, driving buffalo and all other life before it into a river. "Why not borrow from Virgil, as I did? He is as rich as one of your gold mines, while I am but a poor scribe." And this was my first of inner London.

Fast on top of this came breakfasts with Lord Houghton, lunch with Browning, a dinner with Rossetti to meet the great painters; the good old Jew garmenting me always, and (always pushing back the pay). But still I could not or would not eat or drink. All the time, too, a dreadful sense of terror hung over me; for brother, at Easton, Pa., had written that our sister in Oregon was ill, and he far from well.

One evening Rossetti brought me Walt Whitman, new to me, and that night I lay in bed and read it through - the last book I ever read. I could not bear any light next morning, nor very much light ever since, nor have ever since looked upon any page long without intense pain Hence the "eccentricity" of never having books or papers about me, of writing as few letters as possible, and these on colored or unruled paper. White paper hurts me so that I must look aside, and what with a crippled arm, too, I write a and hand. Pardon all this detail but the facts may save pain to some young writers whom I surely would answer if I could.

Let me here note some things my new poets that you should not do; then some that you must. The random notes of this book will serve you better than all the letters I could ever write you. Spend no time or strength finding fault with a fellow scribe. I know but little of prize fighters or pirates of the high seas, but from what I am told they are far more courteous to one another than are American authors, except in sets and little circles.

If you feel a bitterness my young poet toward some one more favored at this time than yourself, pray God to send some good angel to lay you on your back and take the black drop from your heart, for it will make you not only weak and worthless if it remain, but it will make you certainly miserable. If you cannot learn to see beauty and love beauty in the life and work of Nature, then, believe me, you were not born to the sweetness of song. If you must find faults find them in your own work. I have done this, and it has kept me busy. Nor shall you to the extent of its newness, scorn a new character. [sic] mistake character for eccentricity. Our work, the calling of the poet is the highest under the stars, so are his triumphs the rarest; and he who would despoil him would despoil the dead.<\p>

Nor shall you bewail the afflictions of your flesh. That is old, old; and has been done perfectly. The man who intrudes the weakness of his body is a bore. Let him, if he must, sing the weakness of his mind. But when "he putteth off his armor," then, and not till then, may he tell the pain and peril of his fight. And now fell the pending sword, just as my London life began. Sister was dead and my soldier brother dying-bleeding at the lungs. I took the first steamer, at Southampton for his bedside, so blinded that I had to be led to my berth.

This poem was not in any of my four first books, and so has not been rightly revised till now. It was too long for the tumultuous and swift action; and then the end was coarse and unworthy the brave spirit of Kit Carson. I have here cut and changed it much; as I cut and changed all the matter of my three preceding books in London when I cut and compressed all I had done worth preserving into the Songs of the Sierras.