Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 February 1911 — ONE FRIEND ALWAYS [ARTICLE]

ONE FRIEND ALWAYS

POET NEVER ENTIRELY DEVOID • OF ADMIRERS. Surely the Writer Can Laugh at Disparaging Critics When He la Really . Conscious of the Merit of Hia Lines. When I take my verses from table or shelf and git down at ease in my chair and con my lines over there all by myself, those delicate verses and rare; when I read my lines in the glow of the lamp, those musical lines of my own, and find my eyes both sentimentally damp, there in the dim lamplight alone; when I note the exquisite pathos and sweet, the sentiment tender and true, the faultless perfection of wording and feet, the tales of old joys and of new; when I sound the depths of humanity’s heart, and lift it to glorious height; when with divine genius and consummate art I bring songs of joy and delight; when on my tuned ear all the harmony rings, the harmony clear and divine, and I find dll through such half secrets, on wings as butterflies, light and as ® ne —l say when I sit down and read my own lines, ifß simple as can be tot see the fire of true genius that endlessly*shines—Jim Riley has nothing on me. When I read the humor I’ve written*, myself, such side-splitting humor and real; when I get my manuscript down from the shelf—Ah, well, you must know how I feel;; when I’m, tired of Dean Swift and Bret Harte and Nye, and crave the high mountain and lone, I pass all the everyday humorists by and read some good stuff of my own; it maynot be printed, but pray, what of that? I know every word, line and page; beside it the humor the world reads is flat, but mine seems to ripen with age; so much other humor I’ve read is *pure rot, redeemed by some luminous name, but mine is the kind that just touches the spot and burns with real humor’s bright flame; I see in it points that dre drawn subtly fine, and frame®, for the doubly elect; there's hardly a sen tence, indeed scarce a line, but so her reflection is wrecked on uncharted rocks of pure, unalloyed fun, on reefs of insight that are deep, and I find quite often that ere I am done I’ve laughed myself soundly to sleept and so I’m consumed) with conviction that’s sure, and all of my senses agree that I’ve written humor that’s bound to endure—Sam Clemens has nothing on me.

Oh, thousands of times have my sketches and rhymes come down, to be read, from some shelf; my verses have been read vast thousands of times—l’ve read them that many myself; I find in my hunger for truth and in what I might call the Pierian thirst so many things Shakespeare and I have both thought, though Shakespeare had thought of them first; and though I read him with unenvious eye, his verses have not quite the tone, the real ringing truth that I always descry in reading some lines of my own; I don’t begrudge Shakespeare the fame he may get;- he’s not in the race now for pelf; there isn’t an author that I’d sooner set in authorship next to myself; and so when dull critics may smite me to show how little their shriveled souls be, I’m never dismayed in the least, for I know I’ve ongfeal admirer in Me! —J. W. Foley, in New York Times.