Would you not like me to return some day your version of the Kumamoto R[=o]j[=o], and admirable translation? I preserve it carefully; and have used some of the lines for a sketch in the forthcoming book. I rendered nearly the whole into loose verse, but in spite of my utmost efforts, I could do nothing with the best part of it; I could put no spirit into the lines. My suggestion about it is because it is a very curious if not a very poetical thing; and should you ever make an essay upon modern Japanese military songs, it would be a pity not to include it. So it is always carefully kept, not only for its own sake, but also in view of such possible use.
I find it is still the custom when a _shinj[=u]_ occurs to make a ballad about it, and sing the same, and sell it. This reminds one of London. Ballad customs seem to be the same in all parts of the world.
I shall soon return the books, with a copy of the next _Atlantic_. What could I send you that you would like? I should suggest Rossetti, if you do not know him well--for I think he ranks as high as Tennyson. I have only Wallace among travellers. I have all of Fiske and Huxley and Spencer and Clifford and the philosophy of Lewes. By the way, have you read "Trilby"? I have read it several times over. It is a wonderful book. The art of it escapes one at first reading, when one reads only for the story.
DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--I warned you not to get Gautier's complete works--so you have been disappointed against my desire. Gautier's own opinion was adverse to the publication of his complete poems in this shape. He selected and published separately those which satisfied him, in the "Emaux et Camées." (I once translated "Les Taches Jaunes,"--isn't it?--in the other volume; a bit of weird sensualism quite in the Romantic spirit.) Gautier's work is often uneven. He was a journalist, and lived by the newspaper. His life's complaint was that he could never find time for perfect work: the effort merely to live finally worried him to death during the siege, I think. Still, writing merely for a newspaper,--in haste,--without a chance to think and polish,--his feuilletons remain treasures of French literature. (You are very unjust to his prose; for it is the finest of all French prose.) His complete works are worth having--they run to about 60 vols., but they cannot all be had from one publisher. So he has become a subject for book-collectors. Sainte-Beuve, like Gautier, existed as a journalist. In France a journalist used to have literary chances. In English-speaking countries literary work is still outside of the newspapers; and our would-be littérateurs have therefore a still harder struggle. (See that article in the _Revue_. No English prose could accomplish those feats of colour and sensation--delicate sensation the most difficult to produce. English as an artistic tongue is immeasurably inferior to French.)