Search -
Exits and Entrances; A Book of Essays and Sketches
Exits and Entrances A Book of Essays and Sketches Author:Charles Warren Stoddard General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1903 Original Publisher: Lothrop Publishing Company Subjects: Literary Criticism / General Literary Collections / General Literary Collections / American / General Literary Collections / Essays Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / American / General ... more » Poetry / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: One day I found him pacing the floor of his office in the United States Branch Mint; he was knitting his brows and staring at vacancy, -- I wondered why. He was watching and waiting for a word, the right word, the one word of all others to fit into a line of recently written prose. I suggested one; it would not answer; it must be a word of two syllables, or the natural rhythm of the sentence would suffer. Thus he perfected his prose. Once when he had taken me to task for a bit of careless work, then under his critical eye, and complained of a false number, I thought to turn away his wrath by a soft answer: I told him that I had just met a man who had wept over a certain passage in one of his sketches. " Well," said Harte, " he had a right to. I wept when I wrote it!" Toward the close of the first year of The Overland Monthly, when I was in the Hawaiian Islands, I received a letter from Bret Harte, in which he said : " The Overland marches steadily along to meet its fate, which will be decided in July, but how I know not. Decency requires that you should be present in prose or poetry at these solemn moments, so send along your manuscript. " You do not want my advice; I should give you none that I would take myself. But you have mylove already; and whether you stay with the bananas or return to beans, or whatever you do, short...« less