Will you have the books, or any part of them done up here?--and in the English style, uncut?--Those for the Boston market I should think you would. With best regards to Mellen and Cutler, Very truly yours in haste LONGFELLOW. P. S. By the way; I was shocked yesterday to see in the New York Review that _Undine_ was coming out in your Library of Romance. This is one of the tales of the Wonderhorn. Have you forgotten? I intend to come to New York, as soon as I get through with printing Hyperion; and we will bring this design to an arrangement, and one more beside. Addressed to SAMUEL COLMAN, ESQ. 8 Astor House, New York. That was at a time when it was quite needful that American authors should be business-like, since American publishers sometimes were not. The very man to whom this letter was addressed became bankrupt six months later; half the edition of "Hyperion" (1200 copies) was seized by creditors and was locked up, so that the book was out of the market for four months. "No matter," the young author writes in his diary, "I had the glorious satisfaction of writing it." Meanwhile the "Knickerbocker" had not paid its contributors for three years, and the success of "Voices of the Night" was regarded as signal, because the publisher had sold 850 copies in three weeks. The popularity of the "Voices of the Night," though not universal, was very great. Hawthorne wrote to him of these poems, "Nothing equal to some of them was ever written in this world,--this western world, I mean; and it would not hurt my conscience much to include the other hemisphere."{47} Halleck also said of the "Skeleton in Armor" that there was "nothing like it in the language," and Poe wrote to Longfellow, May 3, 1841, "I cannot refrain from availing myself of this, the only opportunity I may ever have, to assure the author of the 'Hymn to the Night,' of the 'Beleaguered City,' and of the 'Skeleton in Armor' of the fervent admiration with which his genius has inspired me."