What do I wish for you? Such swift, keen pain As though all griefs that human hearts have known Were joined in one to wound and tear your own. Such joy as though all heaven had come again Into your earth, and tears that fall like rain, And all the roses that have ever blown, The sharpest thorn, the sceptre and the throne, The truest liberty, the captive's chain. Cruel, you say? Alas! I've only prayed Such fate for you as everywhere, above All others, women wish,--that unafraid They clasp in eager arms. So, little dove, I give you to the hawk. Nay, nay, upbraid Me not. Have you not longed for love? CARLOTTA PERRY. LETTERS AND REMINISCENCES OF CHARLES READE. I knew Charles Reade in England far back in "the days that are no more," and dined with him at the Garrick Club on the evening before I left London for New York in 1860, when he gave me parting words of good advice and asked me to write to him often. Then he added, "I am very sorry you are going away, my dear boy; but perhaps you are doing a good thing for yourself in getting out of this God-forsaken country. If I were twenty years younger, and enjoyed the sea as you do, I might go with you; but, if travel puts vitality into some men and kills others, I should be one of the killed. What is one man's food is another's poison." He was my senior by more than twenty years, and no man that I have known well was more calculated to inspire love and respect among his friends. To know him personally, after only knowing him through his writings and his tilts with those with whom he had "a crow to pick," was a revelation. He had the reputation of being always "spoiling for a fight," and the most touchy, crusty, and aggressive author of his time, surpassing in this respect even Walter Savage Landor. But, though his trenchant pen was sometimes made to do almost savage work, it was generally in the chivalric exposure of some abuse or in the effort to redress some grievous wrong. Then indeed he was fired with righteous indignation. The cause had to be a just one, however, before he did battle in its behalf, for no bold champion of the right ever had more sterling honesty and sincerity in his character, or more common sense and less quixotism. His placid and genial manner and amiable characteristics in his every-day home-life presented a striking contrast to his irritability and indignation under a sense of injury; for whenever he considered himself wronged or insulted his wrath boiled up with the suddenness of a squall at sea. He resented a slight, real or imaginary, with unusual outspokenness and vigor, and said, "I never forgive an injury or an insult." But in this he may have done himself injustice. Generally, he was one of the most sympathetic and even lovable of men, and his pure and resolute manhood appeared in its truest light to those who knew him best.