2

Shortly after the new Post began the Times called me up and I went over to see Mr. Birchall, Mr. Van Arda's right-hand man. Mr. V. was improving, but not back at office regularly yet. Mr. B. suggesting that I go there, but I at once opened my mind quite frankly, and showed him how things stood with me - my classes at night, which would have to be given up on morning paper work, and the many sizable reasons why it was inadvisable for me just now, perhaps for two or three years more - not longer.

He was a friendly man, with a warm manner and bearded face, and unreserved with me. He concluded I might be right, but said a job would offer any time. Of course, I have Mr. V to thank. I must write him, or call on him.

Two days after was Saturday, and things went so hard and I was so exhausted in the evening, that, feeling something grumpy with myself, I decided I would quit the Post. I told Mr. Byers, the new city editor (succeeding Lamont). He made for Mr. Puckette's office, and after a powwow I was called in. They offered me $15 a week more, and I came back, or rather stayed. That makes my salary $65 a week, pretty good for newspaper work, and I have promise of more. I told them flatly before they made the offer that money didn't count much, and it was true. I don't want to be run down during the day. I want freedom to write, and I want decent assignments. To leave the office tired in mind means that whatever is read or studied doesn't stick, and the result is you stand still.

3

The only way I have got ahead is by plugging away outside the office. I've learned a lot little in it.

I have a great thirst for seeing things nowadays, and I stay in the office as little as possible. Everything seems more important, little things in the street have more meaning for me. It is endlessly interesting. I sop up impressions like a dry sponge. I'm going to be my own man. Books put me on the track of things, but no book runs me. Nothing is really mine till I discover it myself. That's the way with advice, I guess; it can make us receptive to the wisdom that lies in experience, so that we can suck all the marrow out of the hard bone of experience, but it alone is helpless to mould one.

To-day is slush and mild temperature. Last night I went to dinner at Brickell's, and snow was coming down in flakes as big as birds when I walked home. The Brickells now live in the Village, not far from Chelsea, and looking out of their fourth-floor window we could see a painter across the street working away at his canvas under a bright light. We got out opera glasses, and surely enough, it was a snow scene. And he had not even been aware it had begun to snow. Coincidence. He might better have been out in the white night, walking about and getting the feeling. Fresh snow is pretty in a city, but it soon dirties, and then looks grimy and saddened indeed. The snow petered out into rain before I went to bed at 1.

4

To-night I have a French examination,
and not half enough prepared. Of course the mark does not
matter, but I dislike doing anything with middling effort.
The whole hog or nothing is what I'd like to do, but that isn't
always achievable.

I picture Wapako-eta tucked up in
quilts of snow. The last cold snap did only 4 above zero
here, but we suspected it was more severe in Ohio. A
bland winter here. It's a pity you must batter through
roads like that. An automobile is only as good as the road it
rolls on, whereas a horse is much better.

His Cardass

Lucile wrote me a letter. Must answer.

When I don't write you will all have to believe I am
thinking of you, as I do so frequently, but thoughts don't
put themselves down in a stamped envelope without a bit of
decision and bother. Had Xmas dinner with R., but haven't
heard from him since. Will ring him up one day. I am busy,
well, rather sleepy to-day, with more work ahead than I can
possibly do, determined to do it, putting more money in the
bank, enjoying life more than ever before, and wearing glasses.
The glasses are but ten days on my rose. I'm beginning to lose
the feeling of looking through windows and seeing the sashes.
They hit my bank account, as I doubted optometrists, and went
to a Fifth Avenue oculist to have them properly examined.
You get soaked, but feel less fearful of mistakes professional.

5

Didn't get them till I had too, being troubled with
shooting pains and splitting headaches when I read heavily,
as I constantly did.

The paper about Uncle Bert reached me, but I was negligent. Thought it best not to write Aunt Cora, as there was nothing I could say really. Rather than be mentally unhinged, I'd wish me dead forty times. It was merciful for both dead and living.

My love to all, particularly Wed.

Feb 7

Dear F:

You talked of the Teapot Dome. I gathered some
months ago there was a bad smell there, but could not
get at the story. Whenever Harry F. Sinclair has his
finger in the pie, you may look for a carrion pie, I am
told. He has a crooked face. He is an excellent example
of what a stinking thing plutocracy can be. I've been
looking for Fall to shoot himself. Unless he has secret
promises to be protected, there is hardly any other
course. It is the last decent thing he could do. Now you
have the nauseous spectacle of Doheny trumping up a
cock and bull story about a torn nhte, and Sinclair
hiding abroad till his lawyers cook up an alibi for him
and public anger cools. Fall concealed, a guilty wretch,
in the house of Sinclair's lawyer. Fall is worse than
a thief, because a thief runs away and does not wash his hands
and go to church and pretend to be what he is not.

They talked about Wilson's bad judgment in picking men
about him. He chose by his own lights and not politics
and personal gain. He chose Walter Page, Daniels, Pershing,
Bainbridge Colby, McAdoo and a number of others. Not even
a gang of yelping irreconcilables were able to uncover
any red sins of these gentlemen. As for Harding, you
have Daugherty, a slippery grafter, Fall, and - there's no
need to go farther.

W. Herstler,

Feb 7

Dear F.:

Your letter came just now. Woodrow Wilson is
beyond the reach of envy and malice now. As surely as
I live, he is one of the sacred American triumvirate -
"Washington, Lincoln, Wilson. And not the least of them.
The day after his death I went down to Princeton
University, and spent hours going over his old memorials,
the houses he lived in, the halls he taught in. I sat
in the square carved-oak chair he occupied in Seventy-nine
Hall in the years he was president of Princeton. Over
a stone archway, with a bay winddown looking down Prospect
Avenue, two bronze tigers on plinths be low.

"This chair and the carpet" - pointing to a wron red
rug - "are all that's left of his furnishings", said the
SANITRESS, a blowzy motherly old woman who peered at me
out of the tails of her eye, astounded at my interest.
"He was a good man, now, wasn't he - always gentle-like."

I talked with Dr. Van Dyke and Dr. Hibben, now
president of the University. Both were his associates.
Both are big and admirable men in their ways. Behind all
their cordiality was that singular lack of appreciation
and secret trace of envy of all men for their superiors.
There was Prof. Hunt, a blithering old donkey of eighty,

under
who taught W.W. as a student and served/him as president,
and in spite of all his culture and learning never saw
the man. "No man can see above his shoulders", I remember
Frank Harris once saying in a lecture. It's as if our
heads refused to turn up. To the six-foot man the
Himalayas are only six feet high.

I rushed about in taxicabs, and had a deuce of a time
getting my stories off on the wire, after I had written
them, sitting humped over strange and stiff-necked typewriters
in telegraph offices. I ran off to catch a train at
dusk, feeling somewhat sad, having seen hardly anything
of Princeton, ...

Yes, the wage raise is good, and I'm saving my
coppers like a pinchpenny, but not for the stuff itself.
I'm not going to hoard away for middle age yet. As soon as
I get enough together, I'm going to quit newspaper work
for a year or two, and spend twenty-four hours a day
reading, writing on my own hook, and observing things.
Then, if I can't make a go of it with my own scribbling,
I'll come back to the cow for another drink of milk.
Four years ago I never dreamed I would have the power
of expression that is mine now. Four years is a short
time. But my aims are ten miles ahead now, and I feel
little better than a deaf, dumb, and blind man.

Edisom's birthday comes Friday a week, and I hope
to run down to Orange early next week for an interview.
Have written Mr. Meadowcroft.

It's been a mild winter here. To-day bright and
sharp, and the sun rubbing his eyes with a few cloud-fingers
at the foot of the street as I came to work. First-rate
weater.

Dear Father:

I wonder how you'll like this story. I didn't get back from West Orange until fairly late last night, and then I was so tired that I was hardly in a mood to write; but I sat up till midnight and hammered this out.

Journalism has its bright moments - and an interview like this is one of them. I am enclosing a part of Edison's script; it is worth saving, I believe, inasmuch as he autographed it for me.

Hurriedly,

Feb 11 Afternoon

Dear F:

Here's my interview, which I dictated over
long distance telephone from Orange this morning.
I'm sending you a fragment of the old man's handwriting,
a relic worth keeping. I've given the rest away to
eager souvenir hunters. I'd written so many questions
that Meadowcroft threw up his hands, and I was bidden to
pare down the list. Edison hi self would have answered
them without a quiver, though. There's no uppishness
~~about him.~~ about him. He's as simple as greatness is.
A magnificent mind and man.

The other day I stood in Chauncey Depew's
office and heard him make as fine a speech to twenty
men who had come to do him honor as you could wish to
hear. His mind as bright as a watch, and nearly
ninety years old. It's remarkable how a good human
machine will wear when given decent usage.

March 26 1924

Fear Father:

Enclosing editorial from to-day's Times. It makes a good emetic. Imagine the America of Washington, Lincoln, and Wilson, of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, of backwoodsmen with hearts as true as bells and of colonists founding a continent on religious freedom - imagine this America glorified by the "sacred soil of Rome", seat of superstition and sensualism. Imagine this America honored by a Roman priest and a fat Pope who has the arrogance to call himself the ordained mouthpiece of God. I try to stand free of religious prejudice one way or another, but this sort of bootlicking in the Israelitish Mr. Ochs's Times makes me froth at the mouth. There are no good nespapers any more.

Have been too much on the go to write. Extremely busy, but, I fear, not accomplishing much of real worth.

Love to all.

Snow is flurrying outside my window. Am now on the eleventh
floor. Big flakes are falling like fragments from exploded
white clouds. Skyscrapers beyond look indistinct and whitish.
My window is just above St. Paul's churchyard and level
with the steeple. Looking down I see the rows of headstones,
some of them older than the Revolution. It is a pretty
perch here.

D.

D.

Thinking of
Mushrooms & May 10
Sticks cut in red in
my mind. Is it
too early to forecast?

D.

of both.

PRINCES OF THE CHURCH

With all the progress of the world toward democracy, it still clings to these forms and vestments of princely authority. The elevation of two American boys of humble origin to positions more powerful and more magnificent than those of princes of state, amid elaborate and splendid pontifical ceremonies, gives no offense to people of the simplest ways and most democratic instincts and ideals. Indeed, they are pleased by a splendor which brightens a world that has become increasingly gray and colorless of garb under the tyrannical fashion of a practical civilization with its ready-made clothes and one pattern and ornaments from

one mold. They also rejoice, whatever their creed, as if they actually stood in "the little corner of America transplanted to the sacred soil of Rome," and witnessed the touching ceremony. They share in the emotion, which they perhaps conceal, but feel as strongly as did Hilda, the Puritan daughter of New England, in Hawthorne's "Marble Faun," in the presence of the symbols of faith transcending evidence.

The French philosopher who contends that we are ceasing to look to the local sanctions of the past and are glorying in the illocal must have pause when he sees this high ceremony, bringing men from the ends of the earth to a particular locality and invoking the sanctions of a past as old as the Christian era. To these impressive dignities are added the best that art and music have contributed out of the ages to a race-history which GEORGE EDWARD WOODBURY has defined as "the perpetual celebration of the mass"—a chronicle whose every page is initialed by the sign of sacrifice.

Cardinal HAYES, who belongs in a very special way to New York City—though it claims both of the new Cardinalins, since already named by his clergy as "the Cardinal of Charities." It is a name that not only recalls one of his supreme services to this city but also characterizes the noteworthy contribution of his country to the relief of the woe of the world in his day. The city of his birth, with its ever-hanging and hurrying life, and the country to which he has given patriotic service should in their gratitude and pride adopt this title for him and salute him as "Cardinalis Benignatum."

Dudley Nichols

New York Evening Post

20 VESEY STREET
NEW YORK, N.Y.

Dr. G. B. Nichols,
Wapakoneta,
OHIO.

April 5 1924

Dear Father:

I meant to let you know yesterday my box had come safely but had a heavy day and the matter slipped my mind. Nor have I telephoned Robert. Tried to get him once and failed. Just now called his house, but unable to get any answer. It is just a quarter after 7 in the morning, this is my early day, and that is why I can't get him now I suppose. He has not moved from No. 247, at least not to my knowledge. Tried to ring him up several Sundays ago, but no use. Their phone goes through a switchboard in the lobby of the building, presided over by a blackfaced woman of sleepy and easygoing character named Florence, and I really believe Florença makes it a point never to answer calls. I believe she prides herself on it.

The syrup came in grand shape. It was there Thursday evening when I got home, safe in the hallway downstairs. The box had splintered but the strings held it together. Meland was at hand and we emptied out a pint straight off, filled two flat dishes, cut two large slices of bread, and fell to. It is our belief that there never was syrup of just such a flavor.

The snapshots of John, returned here, are bully. He is a fine looking fellow. I wish you and he may have some fishing when he comes home for spring vacation. Tell him I'm trying to make his

grade in scholarship. Last semester I got B in Latin (Ovid) and
A in French. It seems odd to be graded schoolboy fashion. Of course
it means nothing to me.

It is harder now to keep up the evening classwork.
Many assignments of work conflict. I've been in the office nearly
all week, doing what is called re-write, taking reports from
leg-men over the phones and weaving them into coherent stories.
That jibes all right with the classes. But Monday I go down Long
Island way to Mineola, for a court trial, and it is going to be
touch and go to make classes at 5:15 here. I'll have to miss one
or two, I fear, which doubles ones troubles. With good luck I'll
be able to get away after two or three days, leaving another man I'm
taking along, as well as a photographer, and handling the rest of
the story from the office here.

To-morrow evening I hope to hear Bertrand Russell, the
English philosopher and mathematician.

My how I'd like mushroom hunting. But I'm afraid it's
no use thinking about it this year. Say hello to old Pete for me.
I can hear him yell baloochie! even now.

There's no satisfactory thanks for anything like the syrup.
It will make me think of Wapak for some months to come, think with
the stomach, which is oftentimes a stronger organ of sentiment than
the heart. Did Kitty and Ned have a hand in the packing. I'll bet
you all went up and got your stock in the woods. Have been sating
some books for Ned, hoping I could read them myself to him. Love to all.

Audley

May 24 1924.

Dear Father:

Your letter here yesterday. Only finished it while I was on a Long Island train last night. Am tempted to write John but can't muster time to-day. Will put it off for a spell, I guess. Hope he's making no mistake about the summer. Know Grosse Point, a pretty place. Detroit is a sordid city - I don't like it. Nothing to stir the mind and exalt people. All business, business, business, and production for profit, and Rotary Clubs and Lions and Kiwanis. Money and bluff. New York is forty times finer and there are beautiful things here. Ten times cleaner too. I know a good deal about Detroit. Incidentally I had my pocket picket on a Woodward Avenue car one night. But that didn't turn me against the place.

There are many things I'd like to tell you about.
So many in fact that I can't start. I'd like to tell about meeting
Mr/ Van Anda the other day. went to cover the story of the new
telephotograph, which sends pictures over wires. There in the darkroom
was a little man with a cane and a large cigar, nervously jotting
down data on a roll of paper with a lead pencil. His eyes snapping.
We shook hands and had a chat, he asking about you. Fine man,

I'm going on two weeks vacation. Question is,
ought I try to go to Ohio? Have decided not, and am putting the
$100 in the bank instead. But by George! I'd like to have a week
there. Just don't feel I can spend the money when I saving so

carefully.

Monday I'll put a pack on my back and walk down Long Island. Go to Montauk Point and back, that's 120 miles, putting up at hotels or farmhouses where evening finds me. Will walk down on the Atlantic shore and back on the Sound. Will stop and see Walt Whitman's birthplace. This will be cheap and will tone me up. Then I'll spend a week seeing New York - I mean the places my work doesn't take me - all the museums and picture galleries. One can easily put in a week at it. At nights the library. Think it will make a pretty good two weeks. McFee still in South America. Morley sailing to-day for a summer in France with Mrs/M/ and the four children. My housemate Meland down in bad with the cold I got rid of. He's a husky fellow too, and it only put me down one day. He's been off five. I'm thoroughly sick of and thoroughly in love with newspaper work by turns; but the general state of mind and body is good. I've got a goal and I drive away at it every day, and that's one definition of success. Mr Curtis dined the editors on his yacht in the Hudson the other night and I am reliably informed that, my name coming up in the discussion of affairs, I was called a valuable man and the best newspaper writer in New York. It isn't good to hear these things. Of course I'm not. But anyway, I'm the most ambitious, I believe; which is half the battle.

Mushrooms - Lord, how I've thought of them. Went in and got a stew of the cellar grown variety, umbrella shapped. Stewed, they suggest morels. But still forty miles shy of the real flavor. And it's the finding, not the eating, that charms. My regards to Pete and the Diegel boys. Shan't forget how Pete's car brushed through that nye of pheasants on the road. But I've shot my last bird. Those pattridges cured me. Beautiful birds, just as pheasants and quail are. I'm through shooting things. Fishing is best.

3

You know, I like those Diegel boys. It's
a tragedy for men with their fine potential qualities to be shut
off from three-fourths of life by shyness, work, remoteness, and
the xoxuses of life's accidents of environment. They'll miss a
lot of happiness they deserve to get. As things lie, they'll tend to
shrink more and more into themselves as time goes by. That's all
Thoreau
right for minds of great original force, like Thoreau, but
distressing for others, who haven't the solace of literature.

I had a two hours talk with a noble old man
the other day - Dr/ Algernon Crapsey, 76 years old and as vigorous
in mind and body as a man of fifty. He was convicted of heresy
in 1906 and unfrocked by the Episcopal church. He had been pastor
of St/ Andrew's in Rochester. Since that time he has read and
written and gone steadily forward. He was unfrocked for declaring
Jesus was the same from the womb to the grave as you or I. But
he is a great Christian, a pacifist as Jesus was, a Communist as
Jesus was, and a noble gentle highly original character as
fine as true steel. An agnostic, he defined himself when I
pressed as a "pantheistic humanist." He called himself humorously
the last of the heretics. "They'll never convict another heretic", he
said. "Thought is going ahead." His learning enormous - he outlined
the whole Christian development to me, and finally: "But Christianity
is bound to go. In the end law and religion will be one. To-day
Christianity the church is in fragments - the one large Catholic
piece and sixty five Protestant fragments. The time will come when there
will be ten thousand churches, each human mind a church to itself."
Personal immortality - pooh. The universe - not to be grasped. But all
of it in its beautiful mathematical accuracy and radiance, is God
amorphous, the Divine mind in the raw, which becomes conscious of itself
only through the irresistible evolution of the human being.

4

In short Man is God becoming conscious of himself. On this ball
of mud man is the highest mind and therefore the most
self conscious divinity. On other planets it may be infinitely
more self conscious or less. In fact this is just
a sketchy shadowing of our discussion. But in brief it is
just an elaboration of someone's verses:

One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
Towards which the whole creation moves. . .

That event would be *the complete consciousness* God's complete consciousness of Self. We cannot prophesy that far, only climb relentlessly up the ladder towards it, using imagination for our arms and science for the hands on the arms. Or rather, it is the other way round. Imagination grasps up the new truth, science pockets it. That's why poetry is always ahead of science, Erasmus Darwin before Charles.

You'd be surprised at the spread of this rational
philosophy. In Bernard Shaw's play "Saint Joan" (of Arc) which I saw
the other night, Joan is telling of her visions to an incredulous
coarse overlord. She attributes her "voices" to St/ Michael and St/
Margaret.

"But suppose they are your imaginings", says
Robert de Baudricourt.

"Of course they are my imagination", cries Joan.
"That's the way God sends his messages to us."

And in another play by Wells and St/ John Ervine -
"The Wonderful Visit". An angel comes to earth and is speaking with
a Christianly old vicar. Pretty soon the angel divulges he has no
reality as men conceive it.

5

"Then", says the old man brokenly, "you are
nothing more than a dream."

"I am nothing less than a dream", says the angel.

All signs and portents everywhere, to what
point I turn my eyes. Every bush seems a burning bush to me. It makes
life deep and worth the living.

I had dinner with Nikola Tesla some weeks ago
and a talk till midnight 1 A.M. after. He gave me an interesting idea -
one of many. I wanted a rational explanation of why we couldn't
imagine God, why we could only touch him through poetry. Because, he
said, he is infinity. Now every idea we have is a combination
of brain cells, each cell adding to the chemical compound which
we call an idea its quota of sentiment, emotion, a picture, a word
heard in childhood, an hereditary instinct - one of the myriad things
with which our wonder brains are laden. Each idea a combination of
a certain number of these. The deeper the thinker, the more complex
the cell combinations which take place in him constantly. Most people
do not think, their cells do not cross, there is no fertilization of
mind, and no fruit. These can only muse, run over in their heads
the pictures and impressions on the photographic cells. But the thinkers -
the number of cells in their brains are finite, maybe millions,
but finite. Therefore they can give only a finite number of combinations
and permutations. Therefore that combination, that magical mysterious
combination which would be the true idea of God, which would reveal
him, are beyond the scope of this mind.

At least that's an interesting idea, right or wrong.

Dudley Nichols

New York Evening Post

Dr G B Nichols
Wapakone ta
Ohio.

TELEPHONE WHITEHALL 9000

20-24 VESEY STREET, NEW YORK, N. Y.

New York Evening Post

FOUNDED 1801

July 3

Dear F:

Just a line to say I'm well and doing well.
Working on Democratic convention fifteen hours a day or
better. No time for anything but food and sleep, and not much
of the last. But It's great fun, interesting. See
Henry Goeke on floor in front of me each day and night.
Went down and shook hands for a moment. I'd like to get
rou d to the Commodore Hotel and see him and Mrs G before they
leave, but don't know whether I can make it.

Had a fine walking trip. Went up into
the Catskills instead of Long island way, and climbed Slide
Mountain. Forty two hundred and such some feet. Beautiful.

I'm getting to be quite a politician.

More later. R egards to all.

My friend Morley has taken his wife and four kids to France and has rented for a spell a pretty cottage at Donville-les-Bains, about fifty miles along the coast from Cherbourg. He asks me to come over and stay rent free. It's tempting but I cabled "No." Not just yet.

Saw Robert for a short hour at lunch about two months ago. Nothing from him since.

I'm looking as strong as a butcher. How's Ned? Give my love to all.

McFee says "Don't forget to send Ned my love."

July 16

Dear Father:

I am going out to Chicago to cover the I. oeb-
Leopold trial beginning August 4, and if things pan
out well, I ought to be able to stop off a few hours
or a day or maybe a day and a night in Wapak. Expect
I'll make Chicago by August 3 or even a day earlier.
More specific details later.

Just lining up a sea voyage now. Am going out with
the Coast Guard for a week, patrolling Rum Row - as the
locus of thirty-odd rum ships 12 to 20 miles of the
Jersey and Long Island coats is called. Another series, I
expect. Am trying to get a friend, Briggs of the Chicago
Daily News, to go along - a fine fellow.

Pretty busy.

If events should require my going straight through, will
stopover on way back, but whether that's a week, a month, or
more, I don't know.

THE VIRGINIA HOTEL
CHICAGO

THE VIRGINIA HOTEL
CHICAGO

Dr G B Nichols
Wapakoneta
OHIO.

HOTEL BULLETIN CHICAGO LOUVRE

THE VIRGINIA HOTEL

OPERATED BY THE VIRGINIA HOTEL CO.

W. E. DEFENBACHER, PRESIDENT

CHICAGO

Sunday Aug 3.

Dear Father:

This wire of yesterday is so flattering that it is a bit brazen to flaunt it. I guess I have done well enough. But I have worked without let. I might explain that Bond is managing ed of the Post, Lewis telegraph ed, and David Smiley executive ed of both NY Post and Phila Ledgers. Smiley is the staff of Cyrus Curtis in his newspaper ventures.

Today I am taking it easy. Though I file a story this evening for the morning Ledger. I pray the trial will be over this week. So far I've spent between two and three thousand dollars in telegraph tolls. Costing about $1500 a week. ~~They~~ seem to think it's worth it. Don't think now I'll go back by way of Detroit. But no doubt will stop at Wapak. Love.

Sep 19

Dear Father: Your letter come. No I don't care about
those letters. Just wanted you to see them.

I am in the throes of quitting here. They won't hear
to it. Offer me $100 a week and shorter hours. It is a
temptation. But I'm going to follow my instinct
if it breaks my neck. This news work only stirs the
top of one's mind and stirs that surface so turbulently
that nothing can be developed below. My brains are still
plastic, I want to knead them before they harden like
cement. I am resolute on this. Life is full of
compromises, they say. Well I am going to live mine
as uncompromisingly as I can.

There is one possible alternative. I could be
a kind of reserve reporter, on hand when anything
important happens. Maybe two assignments in one week and
then nothing more for a month. That would let me do some
reading and studying and thinking. Reading is essential.
The mind of each generation can only shoot so far. And
without reading most of us are shooting over old ground.
If you want to explore the northern pole, say, it is silly
to start in at Labrador without *xxx* the chart drawn
by people long dead.

Indeed, imagination is the only thing really precious
in life. It cannot be bought or stolen. It alone reveals
the hidden beauty of the visible world. Hearn could see
more with his sandblind eyes than the common run of folks

can through microscopes. Nothing is, by itself. It is
anything you see in it. That is why I like poetry.
Poetry is pure imagination expressed in rhythmic words.
That is what Shelley meant when he wrote that poetry
"lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and
makes that is familiar be as if it were not familiar."

Of course most stuff that passes for poetry is not
poetry. Rhyme and measured lines have very little
to do with it. Learn at his best wrote poetry, using
invisible prose rhythms discernible only to the ear,
and so on. When Emerson gripped things with his
imagination alone he used obviously metric forms.

Imagination is the Promethean fire which was stolen
from the gods. Without it men are animals, bestial animals
or human animals or industrious moral animals, but animals.
That faculty of fire alone can make gods of men.

But all this sounds pretty dogmatic. My mind is full
of the subject and I am pressed for time. I see that
you perceive these facts as well as I.

More another time,

Dudley Nichols

New York Evening Post

Dr G B Nichols,
Wa pakone ta
OHIO.

Sep 27

Dear Father:

You have the wrong idea of the work of a New York
reporter if you think he is in a position to pour out the
fruit of his mind on this topic and that. Now and then,
by what amounts almost to intellectual trickery, I am able to
contrive this, but my days, like the days of all reporters who
are that and nothing more, are spent in poll-parroting.
On a story like the Yerkes yarn, or like a Tesla story
I did to-day, one weaves almost wholly from one's own
mind. But that sort of thing must be stuffed down the
throats of unimaginative editors. Both these assignments,
for instance, I had to make for myself and talk the
editors into them. Then what happens? The Tesla story is
"put inside" among the lipstick ads and corset displays,
and in the second edition it is cut to one-third its
length. (No, the paper has just come up and I find it
was cut in two even on the first edition) That's what
happens to the things you sweat blood over. You seem to
think I have learned in this office everything I know and
am able to do. Assuredly not, what I have accomplished
I have done by hard hours spent outside the office, not
listening to fools but bending over books, studying like
a scholboy, or thinking on walks by myself and observing
things with the eye of truth and not the hysterical aspect
of things which newspapers generally have, mawkish and
distorted and false. The glory of god would be lost to the world
save for books. In the library are the embalmed voices of all