Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

perhaps also to write to him-will you tell me which of us is
right?
As a comment on this I append the letter that came
afterward from the young lady we had attempted to rebuke:
Please accept my thanks for all your excellent advertising of
my book. You have helped me very much. Your very kind and
shrewd article has brought me letters from all parts of the
country. With sincere thanks, yours, E WHEELER.
And yet the young Poet of Passion was as dead wrong
about the motive as Edward Stanwood was about the
facts. Afterward she came east and became the centre
of a literary cult, establishing a salon, which I never attended, but of which Julian Ralph gave me an engaging
account. She scrapped her Swinburne, married a Connecticut gentleman, and lived a long life of admirable wifehood.
Mrs. Wilcox produced through the years a vast volume of
decorous and morally irreproachable verse that cheered
and helped thousands of readers; for in the mart of poesy
the intellectuals are by no means the only seekers and
consumers of wares. Even J. Gordon Coogler, a pioneer
poet of a different section and a very different sort, whom
Kingsbury discovered and encouraged for full a decade
of years, expressed this thought yearningly in his immortal
rhyme:
"Alas for the South! Her books have grown fewerShe was never much given to literature."
Of Ella Wheeler's first visit to New York I retain a distinct recollection. She came forthwith to The Sun office,

a demure and rather unsophisticated little lady in the
garments of her zone. She said nothing about roses and
raptures, but was inquisitive about street-car lines, and
manifested an almost childish eagerness to be directed