"It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps
I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I
don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and
the signature (which I guessed at). There's a singular and a perpetual
charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its
novelty .... Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but
yours are kept forever -- unread. One of them will last a reasonable
man a lifetime."
-- Thomas Aldrich
in a letter to Professor E.S. Morse, circa 1889.
Modern Prose And Poetry For Secondary Schools Edited With Notes,
Study Helps, And Reading Lists By Margaret Ashmun, M.A. Boston, New
York, Chicago: Houghton Mifflin Company (1914).