MY DEAR HENLEY,--Heavens! have I done the like? "Clarify and strain," indeed? "Make it like Marvell," no less. I'll tell you what--you may go to the devil; that's what I think. "Be eloquent" is another of your pregnant suggestions. I cannot sufficiently thank you for that one. Portrait of a person about to be eloquent at the request of a literary friend. You seem to forget, sir, that rhyme is rhyme, sir, and--go to the devil. I'll try to improve it, but I shan't be able to--O go to the devil. Seriously, you're a cool hand. And then you have the brass to ask me _why_ "my steps went one by one"? Why? Powers of man! to rhyme with _sun_, to be sure. Why else could it be? And you yourself have been a poet! G-r-r-r-r-r! I'll never be a poet any more. Men are so d----d ungrateful and captious, I declare I could weep. O Henley, in my hours of ease You may say anything you please, But when I join the Muse's revel, Begad, I wish you at the devil! In vain my verse I plane and bevel, Like Banville's rhyming devotees; In vain by many an artful swivel Lug in my meaning by degrees; I'm sure to hear my Henley cavil; And grovelling prostrate on my knees, Devote his body to the seas, His correspondence to the devil! Impromptu poem. I'm going to Shandon Hydropathic _cum parentibus_. Write here. I heard from Lang. Ferrier prayeth to be remembered; he means to write, likes his Tourgenieff greatly. Also likes my _What was on the Slate_, which, under a new title, yet unfound, and with a new and, on the whole, kindly _dénouement_, is going to shoot up and become a star.... I see I must write some more to you about my Monastery. I am a weak brother in verse. You ask me to re-write things that I have already managed just to write with the skin of my teeth. If I don't re-write them, it's because I don't see how to write them better, not because I don't think they should be. But, curiously enough, you condemn two of my favourite passages, one of which is J. W. Ferrier's favourite of the whole. Here I shall think it's you who are wrong. You see, I did not try to make good verse, but to say what I wanted as well as verse would let me. I don't like the rhyme "ear" and "hear." But the couplet, "My undissuaded heart I hear Whisper courage in my ear," is exactly what I want for the thought, and to me seems very energetic as speech, if not as verse. Would "daring" be better than "courage"? _Je me le demande._ No, it would be ambiguous, as though I had used it licentiously for "daringly," and that would cloak the sense. In short, your suggestions have broken the heart of the scald. He doesn't agree with them all; and those he does agree with, the spirit indeed is willing, but the d----d flesh cannot, cannot, cannot, see its way to profit by. I think I'll lay it by for nine years, like Horace. I think the well of Castaly's run out. No more the Muses round my pillow haunt. I am fallen once more to the mere proser. God bless you. R. L. S.