else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I
might so far forget myself as to be a novelist. I
was, with my friend J. J. Piatt, the half-author of
a little volume of very unknown verse, and Mr.
Lowell had lately accepted and had begun to print
in the Atlantic Monthly five or six poems of mine.
Besides this I had written poems, and sketches,
and criticisms for the Saturday Press of New
York, a long-forgotten but once very lively ex-
pression of literary intention in an extinct bohe-
mia of that city; and I was always writing poems,
and sketches, and criticisms in our own paper." ¹

The Poems of Two Friends ( 1860) alluded to,
did not quite, as he somewhere else depreciatingly
avers, become "instantly and lastingly unknown
to fame." Lowell noticed the book in the Atlantic,
albeit without the enthusiasm he came later to
indulge for one of its authors. Nevertheless, it is
now the property of bibliophiles, being the rarest
with one exception of the Howells books. It has
a history to delight collectors. Lida R. McCabe
is authority for the statement that ( 1898) Howells
himself did not possess a copy. ² Its failure, how-
ever, did not dishearten the young poet; he com-
posed assiduously during his Venetian consulate,
and assaulted with little success editorial offices
on both sides of the water. After his return, when
he became an editor himself, publication seems to
have come more easily; and in 1869 No Love Lost,
a Romance of Travel, in his favorite hexameters,

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