Well, my darling, this is about the only really idle day I have had for many months. It would not be idle, but for the fact that we run over to Ithaca tomorrow for a 2-day visit,1explanatory note & it isn’t worth while to begin anything new till we get back. I have been in New York the past three weeks licking that dreadful play of Ah Sin into shape & rehearsing it 4 hours a day with the actors. The moment it was launched before the public I skurried home, glad the troublesome thing was off my hands. It seems to be a real success, since it keeps on filling the theatre this hot weather. I have written a new play by myself since we came to the farm, but I think I will let it lie & ripen under correction some months yet before producing it. I have a vast opinion of the chief character in it. I want to play it myself, in New York or London, but the madam won’t allow it. She puts her 2½2explanatory note down with considerable weight on a good many of my projects.

I wonder what you’ve been reading, my charming sister. I haven’t been reading anything. Too busy. One mustn’t read when he has so anything to do. It distracts. More than that—it burns intellectual fuel; then you have only a warm fire under your work when you could just as well have had a hot one. One shouldn’t have a single interest in the world outside of his work. He should work 3 months on a stretch, dead to everything but his work; then loaf diligently 3 months & go at it again. Only Bunyan, Sir Walter Raleigh, the author of Don Quixotte, & a few other people have had the best of opportunities for working, in this world. Solitary imprisonment, by compulsion, is the one perfect condition for perfect performance. No letters, no telegrams, no bores, no responsibilities, no gaddings about, no seductive pleasures beckoning one away & dividing his mind. Then his work becomes his pleasure, his recreation, his absorption, his uplifting & all-satisfying enthusiasm. He is miserable only when the work-day closes. And yet a man so circumstanced need never be actually miserable; for he can weave his fancies & continue his work in his head until sleep overtakes him. He lives in a fairer world than any that is outside, he moves in a goodlier company than any that others know, & over them he is king & they obey him. If it were not for Livy & the cubs, this sun should not set before I would kill somebody in the second degree.

I cannot quite say I have read nothing. No, I have read half of Les Miserables, two or three minor works of Victor Hugo, & also that marvelous being’s biography by his wife.3explanatory note I have read Carlyle’s wonderful h History of the French Revolution, which is one of the greatest creations that ever flowed from a pen. I followed that with Mr. Yonge’s recent “Life of Marie Antoinette,”4explanatory note which is without exception the worst blindest & slovenliest piece of literary construction I ever saw, & is astounding in another way: it starts out to make you a pitying & lamenting friend of Marie, & but only succeeds in making you loathe her all the way through & swing your hat with unappeasable joy when they finally behead her.

I followed that with “In Exitu Israel,” a very able novel by Baring-Gould, the purpose of which is to show the effect of some of the most odious of the privileges of the French nobles under l’ancien regèmeⒶemendation, & of the dischurching of the Catholic Church by the National Assembly in ’92.5explanatory note I preceded this with one of Dumas’s novels, “The Taking of the Bastille,” & another which illustrated the march of the rioters upon Versailles, the massacre upon the Champ de Mars, the frightful scenes of the 10th of August & 2d of September &c.6explanatory note

I followed all these with a small history of France in French & a story by Madame de Genlis,7explanatory note also in French, neither of which cast much light upon my subject or amounted to much. I would have done well to stop with Carlyle & Dumas. The others only confuse one—except some chapters in Taine’s “Ancient Regime,” a book I forgot to mention.8explanatory note

You may easily suppose I hate all shades & forms of republican government, now—or rather with an intensified hatred, for I always hated them. To make matters worse, I read as much of Motley’s Dutch Republic as I could stand, on my way to Bermuda, & would have thrown the book into the sea if I had owned it, it did make me so cordially despise those pitiful Dutchmen & their execrable Republic.9explanatory note Pittsburgh & the riots neither surprised nor greatly disturbed me; for where the government is a sham, one must expect such things.10explanatory note

MindⒶemendation, I believe this: Republican government, with a sharply restricted suffrage, is just as good as a Constitutional monarchy with a virtuous & powerful aristocracy; but with an unrestricted suffrage it ought to perish,—& will perish because it is founded in wrong & is weak & bad & tyrannical.

Tell your mother I am doing what every good citizen ought to do—trying my best to win you & the rest of the rising generation over to an honest & saving loathing for universal suffrage.

I am just finishing Charles Reade’s Woman Hater, which has a handful of diamonds scattered over every page, & have also begun Picciola in French.11explanatory note

Well, my old darling, I won’t pester you any further, this time, but will only pile up here a cargo of love for you & our mother & the rest, & sign myself lovingly,