Milligan Place
Crawfordsville . Ind .

Dear Billy :-

There is in your letters to me a tone of patient resignation wherefrom I judge that my gentle habit of forgetting everything does not appeal to you . You mention first an apology which I do not in the least remember, second certain " writing " which I recall only as something I might in the dim past have said I was about to do . My humility is the most disgusting thing about me .

Doc. Evans always sends me a postal or telegram just before the appointed time for any appointment which we may have, New York Papers please copy .

I have a faint feeling that perhaps the Doc. is wiser in his day and generation than the other children with whom I play .

Sometimes I think that the person who finally marries me will owe a great deal to the many who didn't. I have arrived at the point where no broom-stick is necessary, I am a dandyldon seed upon the winds of destiny (gory phrase aint it!) but these delightful diversions of mine on life death and immortality always seem to bore you . To the concrete: Wabash is half as large again as Hamilton, I have 61 infants in one french class and in my three classes altogether over a hundred young to be a model to . There is a damn pardon, a Y.M.C.A. reception this evening where I must presumably go and be mistaken for a freshman in order to get acquainted with the shootescent idea of the young . The young are always with us . Some times I feel that way myself .

I wonder maybe sometimes if you weren't right i.e. if your dramatic sense were not more correct than my own when you suggested killing this correspondence rather than letting it die in a sad cow-like fashion .

We have not seen each other for so long (mea culpa) that we have gotten utterly out of touch. I shall be glad to see you if our ways cross again but in honest truth I have not enough to say to you (this huge sheet to the contrary notwithstanding)

Michigan Place
Crawfordsville

Dear Billy

I am very glad to get your letter.

"Be blunt" very well. As for things personal I said all I had to say, I think, and more than I could say ever again in a certain letter which came back to me, read or unread, well or ill understood ? I know not.

For things impersonal then: and my self impersonal:

I am interested in art and extacy - , extacy which I would define as the sensation of the soul in ascent, art as the expression and sole means of transmuting, of passing on that extacy to others.

Religion I have defined as "Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art." by which I mean that it is only now and then that religion rises to the dignity of art. or from another angle. That art includes only so much of religion as is factive, potent, exalting.

Swedenborg has called a certain thing "the angelic language" by the way I will send you certain things out of Swedenborg that will save me much preface. It will take a week or two for me to get at them. This "angelic language" I choose to interpret into "artistic utterance".

Wm. Blake . has given us this dictum.

"Noah's rainbow, the triple bow of music, poetry, painting, by which we ascend "To meet God in the air"

. Coleridge has given us. "KALON quasi KALOUN"

Kalon the greek for "The Beautiful" as it were Kaloun

"a calling" to the soul.

Poetry is my "metier" the only one of the arts
in which I have progressed beyond the kindergarten stages.
Anything I do outside, word weaving, paint, harmony, is a
make-shift, a contrivance to preserve "This body-rag-thing tattered
on my soul"

I have never bothered you with my verse, you have not made it easy for me to do so until now.

Therefore, asking you to pardon what is yet imperfect, looking rather to what I have striven to express than to the technicalities and minutiae of that expression, I give you that part of me which is most real, furthermore distinguished.

most removed from the transient personality, ( persona, a mask )
most nearly related to the things that more permanent than
this smoke wraith the earth . .

For the form . ( and from now . except when I note it the
quotations are from my own stuff . )

Unless things infinite were known to us by sign
We perish touching them, and this my song
Were shattered as that dust ye call the stars .

k.

Some I will copy, some I will send you to keep and some
that I have not time to copy I will mark to be returned .
Of course much of it is in scraps and the best of it
is getting ready for the time when Mr. Mosher will have intelligence
enough to understand how valuable, etc.

Some scraps of theory .

"The end of all art is this: that ye might have life
and have it more abundantly".

Hmm. I guess that treatise is too long to bother with now.

Voici. Of things serious and less serious, For art. ( Oh also
you must get "The Ten O'Clock lecture" in Mr. Whistler's "Gentle
Art of Making enemies". And all of Wm. Butler Yeats that you can
lay hold of. ) for art will not be gloomy or disgustingly serious,
glam, in short, as folk make most things that they think

are holy . .

Blake again "The only evils are cruelties
and repressions".

I throw in all sorts of stuff here, as much as I can
lay hands on at this moment.

Some is literature, some mere autobiography, some nothing
at all I guess. . Some new, some older. I don't expect
you to wade thru all of it at one sitting.

This packet will be a scandal to the post if it gets any
larger. Will send more later if you want me to.

Perhaps I had better send one more lot anyhow
as I find on looking over these that there is hardly
the sort of selection here which will make intelligible certain
large remarks at the beginning of the note.
However in the better part of it you may find some entertainment.
Once can hardly get a system of philosophy into one letter
ergo you will have, if you want it, to take the hodge
podge as it comes.