but no man with any sense of prose could fail
to know that they were all by the same author. 
Only years afterwards did I learn who that
author was.

  I have Stevenson's collected poems over
yonder in the small cabinet. Would that he
had given us more! Most of them are the
merest playful sallies of a freakish mind. But
one should, indeed, be a classic, for it is in
my judgment by all odds the best narrative
ballad of the last century---that is if I am right
in supposing that ``The Ancient Mariner''
appeared at the very end of the eighteenth. 
I would put Coleridge's _tour de force_ of grim
fancy first, but I know none other to compare
in glamour and phrase and easy power with
``Ticonderoga.'' Then there is his immortal
epitaph. The two pieces alone give him a
niche of his own in our poetical literature, just
as his character gives him a niche of his own
in our affections. No, I never met him. But
among my most prized possessions are several
letters which I received from Samoa. From
that distant tower he kept a surprisingly close
watch upon what was doing among the bookmen,
and it was his hand which was among the
first held out to the striver, for he had quick
appreciation and keen sympathies which met
another man's work half-way, and wove into it
a beauty from his own mind.

  And now, my very patient friend, the time
has come for us to part, and I hope my little
sermons have not bored you overmuch. If
I have put you on the track of anything which
you did not know before, then verify it and
pass it on. If I have not, there is no harm
done, save that my breath and your time have
been wasted. There may be a score of mistakes
in what I have said---is it not the privilege of
the conversationalist to misquote? My judgments
may differ very far from yours, and my
likings may be your abhorrence; but the mere
thinking and talking of books is in itself good,
be the upshot what it may. For the time the
magic door is still shut. You are still in the
land of frie. But, alas, though you shut that
door, you cannot seal it. Still come the ring
of bell, the call of telephone, the summons back
to the sordid world of work and men and daily
strife. Well, that's the real life after all---this
only the imitation. And yet, now that the
portal is wide open and we stride out together,
do we not face our fate with a braver heart for
all the rest and quiet and comradeship that we
found behind the Magic Door?

.