to H. B. Baildon

Vailima, January 15th, 1894.

MY DEAR BAILDON,—Last mail brought your book and its Dedication.  ‘Frederick Street and the gardens, and the short-lived Jack o’ Lantern,’ are again with me—and the note of the east wind, and Froebel’s voice, and the smell of soup in Thomson’s stair.  Truly, you had no need to put yourself under the protection of any other saint, were that saint our Tamate himself!  Yourself were enough, and yourself coming with so rich a sheaf.

For what is this that you say about the Muses?  They have certainly never better inspired you than in ‘Jael and Sisera,’ and ‘Herodias and John the Baptist,’ good stout poems, fiery and sound.  ‘’Tis but a mask and behind it chuckles the God of the Garden,’ I shall never forget.  By the by, an error of the press, page 49, line 4, ‘No infant’s lesson are the ways of God.’  The is dropped.

And this reminds me you have a bad habit which is to be comminated in my theory of letters.  Same page, two lines lower: ‘But the vulture’s track’ is surely as fine to the ear as ‘But vulture’s track,’ and this latter version has a dreadful baldness.  The reader goes on with a sense of impoverishment, of unnecessary sacrifice; he has been robbed by footpads, and goes scouting for his lost article!  Again, in the second Epode, these fine verses would surely sound much finer if they began, ‘As a hardy climber who has set his heart,’ than with the jejune ‘As hardy climber.’  I do not know why you permit yourself this license with grammar; you show, in so many pages, that you are superior to the paltry sense of rhythm which usually dictates it—as though some poetaster had been suffered to correct the poet’s text.  By the way, I confess to a heartfelt weakness for Auriculas.—Believe me the very grateful and characteristic pick-thank, but still sincere and affectionate,

Robert Louis Stevenson.