“Cranch and I amuse me very much. They read their poems to each other like a couple of boys, and so contrive for themselves a very good-natured, if limited, public. I cannot help laughing to myself, whenever I am alone, at these rhythmical debauches. The best of it is that there is always one at least who is never bored. I like him very much, though it always makes me a little sad that a man with so many gifts should lack the one of being successful. He brought with him a fairy story full of fancy, and illustrations, most of which are as charming and original as can be. I hope to get Fields to publish it.[24] Cranch wants some such encouragement very much. He begins to think himself born under an ill star. I fancy the trouble is that he was not brought up to work, in a nation of day laborers. You know I have a natural sympathy with the butterflies as against the ants and the bees, and I think they will all be put in a heavenly poor-house one of these days, with the industrious rich to work for them, and buy their books and pictures. Cranch always reminds me of Clough, so you may be sure I like to have him here. We shall enjoy each other very much if we don’t quarrel over our poems. “You will see my verses to Bartlett in the next _Atlantic_,[25] and I guess you will like ’em. They seemed to me fanciful and easy when I corrected the proof, with some droll triple rhymes.... “It is now high time to change the conversation and speak of the weather. We are having it of the rarest April sort--whims of sunshine dappling a continuous mood of rain erratic thunderclaps ending like my novel with the first chapter--promising notes of fine to-morrows ending not in bankruptcy but liquidation. In short, the clerk of the weather seems suddenly to have bethought him of his remissness with the watering-pot for the last two years and is making it up all at once. All the wells (except, of course, that of Truth) will be filled again and milk will be plenty once more. The greenness of everything is delicious. I feel as if I were sprouting myself, so keen is my farmer’s sympathy with my beets and carrots, and especially with a new field of grass which was becoming _too_ emblematic of flesh, and has been snatched from the very jaws of death by this intervention of Jupiter Pluvius. I had just had a new pump set in the well at the foot of the garden, and had begun to think it would be merely a dry symbol, but this will set all its arteries a-throbbing.