HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER. 659 



his own statement, in a little room ten or twelve feet square; and his old 

 housekeeper explained it to me as perfectly practicable " because he had 

 no bookcases," bnt simply piled them against the walls, leaving here and 

 there little gaps in which he put his money. 



In the delicate and touching dedication of Scudder's chief work " Men 

 and Letters" to his friend Henry M. Alden, the well known New York 

 editor, he says : " In that former state of existence when we were poets, 

 you wrote verses which I knew by heart and I read dreamy tales to you 

 which you speculated over as if they were already classics. Then you 

 bound your manuscript verses in a full blue calf volume and put it on 

 the shelf, and I woke to find myself at the desk of a literary workman." 

 Later, he says of himself, " Fortunately, I have been able for the most 

 part to work out of the glare of publicity." Yet even to this modest 

 phrase he adds acutely : " But there is always that something in us which 

 whispers 7, and after a while the anonymous critic becomes a little tired 

 of listening to the whisper in his solitary cave, and is disposed to escape 

 from it by coming out into the light even at the risk of blinking a little, 

 and by suffering the ghostly voice to become articulate, though the sound 

 startle him. One craves company for his thought, and is not quite con- 

 tent always to sit in the dark with his guests." 



The work in which he best achieves the purpose last stated is undoubt- 

 edly the collection of papers called by the inexpressive phrase " Men 

 and Letters ; " a book whose title was perhaps a weight upon it and 

 which yet contained some of the very best of American thought, and crit- 

 icism. It manifests eveu more than his " Life of Lowell " that faculty 

 of keen summing up and epigrammatic condensation which became so 

 marked in him that it was very visible, I am assured, even in the literary 

 councils of his publishers, two members of which have told nie that he 

 often, after a long discussion, so summed up the whole situation in a sen- 

 tence or two that he left them free to pass to something else. We see the 

 same quality for instance in his " Men and Letters,"' in his papers on Dr. 

 Mulford and Longfellow. The first is an analysis of the life and literary 

 service of a man too little known because of early death, but of the rarest 

 and most exquisite intellectual qualities, Dr. Elisha Mulford, author of 

 " The Nation" and then of " The Republic of Cod." In this, as every- 

 where in the book, Mr. Scudder shows that epigrammatic quality which 

 amounted, whether applied to books or men, to what may be best de- 

 scribed as a quiet brilliancy. This is seen, for instance, when in defending 

 'Mulford from the imputation of narrowness, his friend sums up the whole 

 character of the man and saves a page of more detailed discussion by say- 



