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DEAR HELEN,--I must steal half a moment from my work to say how glad I
am to have your book, and how highly I value it, both for its own sake
and as a remembrances of an affectionate friendship which has subsisted
between us for nine years without a break, and without a single act of
violence that I can call to mind. I suppose there is nothing like it in
heaven; and not likely to be, until we get there and show off. I often
think of it with longing, and how they'll say, "There they come--sit
down in front!" I am practicing with a tin halo. You do the same. I was
at Henry Rogers's last night, and of course we talked of you. He is not
at all well; you will not like to hear that; but like you and me, he is
just as lovely as ever.
I am charmed with your book-enchanted. You are a wonderful creature,
the most wonderful in the world--you and your other half together--Miss
Sullivan, I mean, for it took the pair of you to make a complete and
perfect whole. How she stands out in her letters! her brilliancy,
penetration, originality, wisdom, character, and the fine literary
competencies of her pen--they are all there.
Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque
was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any
human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the
soul--let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual
and valuable material of all human utterances--is plagiarism. For
substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously
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