After all our talk (made by me) I guess that stanza would better stand as first written. "Clime"--climate--connotes temperature, weather, and so forth, in ordinary speech, but a poet may make his own definitions, I suppose, and compel the reader to study them out and accept them.
Your misgiving regarding your inability to reach so high a plane again as in this poem is amusing, but has an element of the pathetic. It certainly is a misfortune for a writer to do his _best_ work early; but I fancy you'd better trust your genius and do its bidding whenever the monkey chooses to bite. "The Lord will provide." Of course you have read Stockton's story "His Wife's Deceased Sister." But Stockton gets on very well, despite "The Lady or the Tiger." I've a notion that you'll find other tragedies among the stars if earth doesn't supply you with high enough themes.
Will I write a preface for the book? Why, yes, if you think me competent. Emerson commands us to "hitch our wagon to a star?" and, egad! here's a whole constellation--a universe--of stars to draw mine! It makes me blink to think of it.
O yes, I'd like well enough to "leave the Journal," but--
[The Olympia, Washington, D. C., July 10, 1902.]
If rejection wounded, all writers would bleed at every pore. Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done. Of course I shall be glad to go over your entire body of work again and make suggestions if any occur to me. It will be no trouble--I could not be more profitably employed than in critically reading you, nor more agreeably.
Of course your star poem has one defect--if it is a defect--that limits the circle of understanding and admiring readers--its lack of "_human_ interest." We human insects, as a rule, care for nothing but ourselves, and think that is best which most closely touches such emotions and sentiments as grow out of our relations, the one with another. I don't share the preference, and a few others do not, believing that there are things more interesting than men and women. The Heavens, for example. But who knows, or cares anything about them--even knows the name of a single constellation? Hardly any one but the professional astronomers--and there are not enough of them to buy your books and give you fame. I should be sorry not to have that poem published--sorry if you did not write more of the kind. But while it may impress and dazzle "the many" it will not win them. They want you to finger their heart-strings and pull the cord that works their arms and legs. So you must finger and pull--too.