All the Days of My Life: An Autobiography

The recent death of Robert Barr will give interest to the following letter:

    Hillhead,
    Woldingham,
    Surrey,

Aug. 10, 1901.

Dear Mrs. Barr:

I was very glad indeed to receive a letter from you. I hope you are all well on your hilltop. I have not been in America since I saw you at Atlantic City. I intended to go this summer, but I am off tomorrow to Switzerland instead. I spent all last winter on the Island of Capri in the Bay of Naples.

Your remark about loving your neighbors, but keeping up the fence between, is awfully good, quite the best thing I’ve heard in a year. Our neighbors on the side next you are Scotch people, who own a tea plantation in India, and we like them very much, but there is a fine thick English hawthorn hedge between. My ten acres of Surrey is hedged all round, except the front which faces the ancient Pilgrim’s Way, and there I have built a park fence of oak, which is said to last as long as a brick wall. It is six feet high, and can neither be seen through, nor jumped over.

Mary L. Bisland has been staying in Norfolk. She was in London last week, and I invited her out here, but her married sister, and her sister’s husband were with her, and she couldn’t come. She is coming in October. I met her on the street quite unexpectedly last Wednesday. London is so large, that it always seems strange to me that anybody ever meets anybody one knows. Mary was certainly looking extremely well, but she says her nerves are wrong. She suffers from too much New York apparently.

Your books are the most popular in the land. I see them everywhere. There was a struggle in this neighborhood for your autograph, when it got abroad that I had a letter from you. I refused to give up this letter, but the envelope was reft from me by a charming young lady, daughter of a Scotch doctor of London, whose country residence is out here.

I hope you are well, and that all your daughters are well, more especially the young lady I met at Atlantic City. I trust she has not forgotten me.

    Yours most sincerely,
    Robert Barr.

The Congregational Home Missionary Society

Bible House, Astor Place, New York

    May 13th, 1897.

Dear Mrs. Barr:

What shall I say of your book? That I read it through in one night, which proves my interest – that I have read parts of it – the last three chapters – more than once, and that I envy the hand that can strike such a blow at the cruelest caricature of God, the Father, ever invented by man, the child.

Thank you for many happy hours. Please go right on, smashing idols, letting light into superstitions, and emancipating consciences until the Millennium; which will dawn about the time when you have finished the job.

    Sincerely yours,
    Joseph B. Clark.

Oh, let me say the style was a feast of Saxon to one who loves the language of the people, as I do.

The Century

7 West Forty-Third Street

My dear Mrs Barr:

I should have written long since to thank you for your “Bernicia,” but the month of April was a very busy one, and the composition and delivering of a very long course of lectures at Yale University, left no time for correspondence, however attractive. But the journeys to and from New Haven, made a pleasant opportunity to follow in imagination the pictures of your charming heroine, and I found much delight in your fresh and simple story, told with the same skill, which appears in all your work. I am greatly obliged to you for giving me this pleasure.

Believe me, dear Mrs. Barr,

    Very cordially yours,
    Henry van Dyke.

May 19, 1896.

Cornell University

Department of American History

Ithaca, N.Y

My dear Mrs. Barr:

I am delighted to have from your own hand your new novel “Bernicia,” and am sure that I shall greatly enjoy it myself, and take pleasure in suggesting to others the same source of enjoyment.

How well do I remember you, as I used to meet you at the Astor Library more than twenty years ago; and your steady and triumphant march toward literary success since then, it has been a real delight to witness. With sincere congratulations,

    Yours faithfully,
    Moses Coit Tyler.

26, Oct., 1895.

The Independent

114 Nassau Street,

New York

    Aug. 12, 1892.

My dear Mrs. Barr:

I return to you by mail “The Beads of Tasmer” which I have read through with great interest; in fact nearly all before I reached New York, after my delightful visit at your home. It is a capital story. After my return I called on my Newark neighbor, Reverend Dr. Waters, a Scotchman, and I found that he knew the book well, and said it was a good Scotch, and he has read nearly all your stories with great pleasure.

I had a delightful time in your pleasant home. Give my love to the two daughters, and perhaps I ought to say especially, to the one who enjoyed my story of the man who died, and went to Hell, but got out of it again. But you are all in Heaven.

    Ever sincerely yours,
    William Hayes Ward.

    Crescent Hill,
    Springfield, Massachusetts,
    Nov. 13, 1909.

My dear Mrs. Barr:

I saw your friendly expressions of me in your letter to the G. & C. Merriam Co. And I was pleased to receive the Bookman with the excellent portrait of you. Be sure that I cordially reciprocate your sentiments of regard. Your always welcome visits to the Christian Union office are fresh in my memory so that I well remember the thorough, patient, workmanlike beginnings of your literary career.

Then before long you found your wings, and began that course of admirable imaginative fiction, in which you have had so long and enviable success. It is a great thing to have carried entertainment, stimulus, hope to thousands upon thousands, as you have done.

I am sure that in the essential things, life has dealt kindly by you, or I should perhaps say rather, that you and life have met in the right way; but I hope in the externals and incidentals your path has been pleasant to the feet.