... "They are certainly not in the high key of a man warm with his subject, and doing the thing finely; I wrote them with the reluctance of a turkey-hunter kept from his sport--only Mr. Kennedy's urgent entreaty and remonstrance whipped me up to the labor. You will hardly perceive how they should be called "Ballads." You are somewhat responsible for the name. I designed (originally) to make them short poems of the old understood ballad cast. I sent you the proem, which you published as a preface to the "Froissart Ballads." Words in print bore a look of perpetuity (or rather of fixedness) about them, and what I would have changed if only my pen and portfolio had been concerned, your type deterred me from changing. The term "Froissart Ballads," however, is after all correct, even with the poems as they are. The Master of Bolton is as much a _song_ as the Lay of the Last Minstrel, although I have no prologue, interludes, &c., to show how it was sung; and as for Orthone, &c. Sir John Froissart may as easily be imagined chanting them as talking them." Again he wrote: "You will find them beneath your sanguine prognostic. They are mere narrative poems, designed for the crowd. Poetic speculation, bold inroads upon the debatable land--"the wild weird clime, out of space out of time"--I have not here attempted. I _will_ hereafter merge myself in the nobler atmosphere; in the mean time I have stuck to the ordinary level, and endeavored to write interesting stories in verse, with grace and spirit. I repeat my fear that in writing for the cold, I have failed to touch the quick and warm--in writing for a dozen hunting comrades, who have been in the habit of making my verse a _post prandium_ entertainment, and never endured an audacity of thought or word, I have tamed myself out of your approbation." The book was at length published, but though reviewed very favorably by the late Judge Beverly Tucker, in the Southern Literary Messenger, and by Mr. Poe, in the American Review, and much quoted and praised elsewhere, it was, on the whole, not received according to its merits or our expectations. Yet the result aroused the author's ambition, and after a few weeks he remarked in a letter: "My literary life opens now. If the world manifest any disposition to hear my 'utterances,' it will be abundantly gratified. I am thirty: until forty literature shall be my calling--avoiding however to rely upon it pecuniarily--then (after forty) politics will be a _sequitur_.