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Updated: September 13, 2025
He looked at me meditatively. 'You'll find something to the point in there, he said. He reached up to the little candle-box bookcase over his head, and showed me a little crimson book. It was an anthology. It was called 'The Cheerful City, and dwelt on the delights of civilization and urbanity.
From the letters after the year 1892 I have culled in the spirit of one making an anthology, choosing the passages best in style and most important from the point of view of biography. Where I have been able to collate the original letters I have preserved everything as Miss Keller wrote it, punctuation, spelling, and all. I have done nothing but select and cut.
As to persistent hopefulness: "Pessimism is always nearer the truth than optimism." When the author of such aphorisms undertook to write another anthology about another town he naturally avoided the mystical elevation of Spoon River as well as its verse; he used the irony of a disillusioned man and the directness of a bullet.
I closed my grammar, with all the miserable and complicated stuff about tnpto and its aorists, the enclitic and the double-damned Digamma, to open my Jowett's Plato, my Dakyns' Xenophon, and, later, Gilbert Murray's Dramatists and Mackail's Anthology.
I chanced to pick up the Tales of a Traveller some years ago with a view to an anthology of prose narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit, and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters all were there, all were the property of Washington Irving.
Give him an Ode of Horace, or a scrap from the Greek Anthology, and he would recite it with great inflation of spirits; but he did not think very much of "your Keatses, and your Tennysons, and the whole Hasheesh crazy lot," as he called the dreamily sensuous idealists who belong to the same century that brought in ether and chloroform.
In looking through Von Hammer's anthology, culled from a paradise of poets, the reader feels this painful discontinuity. 'Tis sand without lime, as if the neighboring desert had saharized the mind. It was said of Thomson's "Seasons," that the page would read as well by omitting every alternate line.
But the poet found the prettiness of the Greek Anthology irresistible. Olindo, tied to the stake amidst the flames of martyrdom, can say to his mistress "Altre fiamme, altri nodi amor promise." Canto ii. st. 34. Other flames, other bonds than these, love promised. The sentiment is natural, but the double use of the "flames" on such an occasion, miserable.
The overflowing waters first manured the fields, and then watered the crops, and lastly carried the grain to market; and one writer in the Anthology, to describe the country life in Egypt, tells the story of a sailor, who, to avoid the dangers of the ocean, turned husbandman, and was then shipwrecked in his own meadows.
Reading these, which, with others from Haddington in the following years make an anthology of tenderness and ruth, reading them alongside of his angry invectives, with his wife's own accounts of the bilious earthquakes and peevish angers over petty cares; or worse, with ebullitions of jealousy assuming the mask of contempt, we again revert to the biographer who has said almost all that ought to be said of Carlyle, and more: "It seemed as if his soul was divided, like the Dioscuri, as if one part of it was in heaven, and the other in the place opposite heaven.
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