1. That copy is still preserved,—among the treasures of Mr. Emerson’s library in Concord,—beautifully bound, for such was his habit with books which he specially loved.
2. Margaret Fuller was nine years older than Lowell. A good deal of her early life was spent in Cambridge; and his banter in the Fable for Critics, which was really too sharp, belongs, not to his manhood’s serious views, but to a boy’s humor.
3. In the preface Bancroft says that he has formed the design of writing our history “to the present time.” “The work will extend to four, perhaps five, volumes.” In fact, four volumes carried him to 1776. When he died he had published twelve, which brought him to 1789. One volume of this series, which advances the history only one year, followed its predecessor after two years.
4. I have that little volume now, enriched with James’s marks and annotations, and full of pleasant memories.
5. The Serenade.
6. The oldest form of this song is—
This carries it back as far as 1761.
7. Seeing that Miss Barrett herself recognized the fact that these American magazine publishers were among the first people who ever paid her any money, it is sufficiently English that in the same volume of her correspondence which contains her acknowledgment there is talk about “American piracy.” One would like to know whether Mrs. Browning did not receive in the long run more money from American than from English publishers.
8. Alas, to be eclipsed again!
9. This anecdote arrested attention when it was first published, and I received more than one note explaining to me that it could not be true.
All the same it is true. And I took care to verify the dates of the several steps of the story.
10. Copyright, 1890, by Robert Bonner’s Sons.
Transcriber’s Note
Minor errors in punctuation and formatting have been silently corrected.
Minor inconsistencies and errors which are obviously due to the printer have been corrected, as noted in the table below.
Several page references in the Index were missing, and have been added. The reference to Lady Lyttelton appeared on p. 259. Likewise, the reference to ‘A Virtuoso’s Collection’ appeared on p. 84.
On p. 260, the sentence beginning ‘And Mr. Smalley at the time wrote...’ seems to call for a new paragraph.
In the final poem, ‘My Brook’, the line ‘And Will-o’-Wisp light me his lantern no more?’ was not indented, though the regular form of the poem would indicate that it should have been.
| p. 115 | dilustered | sic. delustered? |
| p. 217 | show what Jef[f]erson thought | Added. Line-break error. |
| p. 258 | Amelia [Blandford] Edwards | sic. Blanford |
The following are transcriptions of the several reproduced documents given in the text. Those which are hand-written are sometimes illegible, and are annotated as such.
* On account of the absence of the Poet the Poem will be omitted.
16 R.W. Emerson with author’s affectionate respects.
N. Hawthorne, with author’s love.