I'm a little alarmed lest you take too seriously my preference of your rhyme to your blank--especially when I recall your "Music" and "The Spirit of Beauty." Perhaps I should have said only that you are not so _likely_ to write well in blank. (I think always of "Tasso to Leonora," which I cannot learn to like.) Doubtless I have too great fondness for _great_ lines--_your_ great lines--and they occur less frequently in your blank verse than in your rhyme--most frequently in your quatrains, those of sonnets included. Don't swear off blank--except as you do drink--but study it more. It's "an hellish thing." It looks as if I _might_ go to California sooner than I had intended. My health has been wretched all summer. I need a sea voyage--one _via_ Panama would be just the thing. So if the cool weather of autumn do not restore me I shall not await spring here. But I'm already somewhat better. If I had been at sea I should have escaped the Cook-Peary controversy. We talk nothing but arctic matters here--I enclose my contribution to its horrors. I'm getting many a good lambasting for my book of essays. Also a sop of honey now and then. It's all the same to me; I don't worry about what my contemporaries think of me. I made 'em think of _you_--that's glory enough for one. And the squirrels in the public parks think me the finest fellow in the world. They know what I have in every pocket. Critics don't know that--nor nearly so much. Advice to a young author: Cultivate the good opinion of squirrels. Sincerely yours, AMBROSE BIERCE. [Washington, D. C., November 1, 1909.] DEAR GEORGE, European criticism of your _bete noir_, old Leopold, is entitled to attention; American (of him or any other king) is not. It looks as if the wretch may be guilty of indifference. In condemning as "revolutionary" the two-rhyme sestet, I think I could not have been altogether solemn, for (1) I'm something of a revolutionist myself regarding the sonnet, having frequently expressed the view that its accepted forms--even the number of lines--were purely arbitrary; (2) I find I've written several two-rhyme sestets myself, and (3), like yours, my ear has difficulty in catching the rhyme effect in a-b-c, a-b-c. The rhyme is delayed till the end of the fourth line--as it is in the quatrain (not of the sonnet) with unrhyming first and third lines--a form of which I think all my multitude of verse supplies no example. I confess, though, that I did not know that Petrarch had made so frequent use of the 2-rhyme sestet. I learn a little all the time; some of my old notions of poetry seem to me now erroneous, even absurd. So I _may_ have been at one time a stickler for the "regular" three-rhymer. Even now it pleases my ear well enow if the three are not so arranged as to elude it. I'm sorry if I misled you. You'd better 'fess up to your young friend, as I do to you--if I really was serious. * * * * *