"
The charming naivete of it!
SITTING in Ellen Terry's dressing-room at the Lyceum Theatre one evening
during that lady's temporary absence on the stage, Sarah Bernhardt
picked up a crayon and wrote this pretty word on the mirror--_Dearling_,
mistaking it for the word darling. The French actress lighted by chance
upon a Spenserianism now become obsolete without good reason. It is a
more charming adjective than the one that has replaced it.
A DEAD author appears to be bereft of all earthly rights. He is scarcely
buried before old magazines and newspapers are ransacked in search of
matters which, for reasons sufficient to him, he had carefully excluded
from the definitive edition of his collected writings.
He gave the people of his best;
His worst he kept, his best he gave.
One can imagine a poet tempted to address some such appeal as this to
any possible future publisher of his poems:
Take what thou wilt, a lyric or a line,
Take all, take nothing--and God send thee cheer!
But my anathema on thee and thine
If thou add'st aught to what is printed here.
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