'You can't think how much I shall value Fireside Travels, (which only reached me during this past week,) now that I have got it of my "very very own" (as the children say,) and with that charming little bit of writing from you at the beginning. I don't mean that I did not delight in the book from the very first time I read a page in it; but the sense of property in it gives a double value, and the sense of successful beggary is very charming, though perhaps I ought to be ashamed. Only I am [italics] not [end italics], because I [italics] am [end italics] successful. I have known you so long! I knew serious poems of yours long ago, - twenty years or so; but my personal knowledge of you began in Rome 1857, - when (did you know it?) you and one other went about with the dear Storys, and me and mine up and down Rome [in the sense, it seems, that Charles Eliot Norton spoke much of Lowell - this is elaborated on...] Well then the Bigelow papers - I think I could stand a Civil Service Examination in them; and we had three copies of our own, till a little daughter married, and carried off one.'