To John Jay Chapman

CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 15, 1910.

Dear Jack,—Just a word to say that it pleases me to hear you write this about Harris and Shakespeare. H. is surely false in much that he claims; yet 'tis the only way in which Shakespeare ought to be handled, so his is the best book. The trouble with S. was his intolerable fluency. He improvised so easily that it kept down his level. It is hard to see how the man that wrote his best things could possibly have let himself do ranting bombast and complication on such a large scale elsewhere. 'T is mighty fun to read him through in order.

I send you a specimen of the kind of thing that tends to hang upon me as the ivy on the oak. When will the day come? Never till, like me, you give yourself out as a poetry-hater. Thine ever,