Perhaps these were all too serious and heavy for your national taste; still one sometimes likes to claim things one cannot fully appreciate.

And then, too, if you had once begun to stay, waiting for the great things to happen and the great books to be written, you would never have gone, for there would still have been Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne to delay you.' "'If we couldn't stay to see out your great bards, we certainly couldn't afford to remain and welcome your minor ones,' I answered frigidly; 'but we wanted to be well out of the way before England united with Scotland, knowing that if we were uncomfortable as things were, it would be a good deal worse after the Union; and we had to come home anyway, and start our own poets.

Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell had to be born.' "'I suppose they had to be if you had set your mind on it,' he said, 'though personally I could have spared one or two on that roll of honour.' "'Very probably,' I remarked, as thoroughly angry now as he intended I should be.

'We cannot expect you to appreciate all the American poets; indeed, you cannot appreciate all of your own, for the same nation doesn't always furnish the writers and the readers.

Take your precious Browning, for example! There are hundreds of Browning Clubs in America, and I never heard of a single one in Scotland.' "'No,' he retorted, 'I dare say; but there is a good deal in belonging to a people who can understand him without clubs!'" "O Francesca!" I exclaimed, sitting bolt upright among my pillows.