He found it
necessary to do his work largely in a personal way, by meeting and
talking with people, and this took up a great deal of his time,
especially after the summer vacation, when he had to get into
relations with them anew, and to help them recover themselves from
the moral lassitude into which people fall during that season of
physical recuperation.
He was occupied with these matters one morning late in October when
a letter came addressed in a handwriting of copybook carefulness,
but showing in every painstaking stroke the writer's want of
training, which, when he read it, filled Sewell with dismay. It was
a letter from Lemuel Barker, whom Sewell remembered, with a pang of
self-upbraiding, as the poor fellow he had visited with his wife the
evening before they left Willoughby Pastures; and it enclosed
passages of a long poem which Barker said he had written since he
got the fall work done. The passages were not submitted for Sewell's
criticism, but were offered as examples of the character of the
whole poem, for which the author wished to find a publisher. They
were not without ideas of a didactic and satirical sort, but they
seemed so wanting in literary art beyond a mechanical facility of
versification, that Sewell wondered how the writer should have
mastered the notion of anything so literary as publication, till he
came to that part of the letter in which Barker spoke of their
having had so much sickness in the family that he thought he would
try to do something to help along.
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