To Isabella Stewart Gardner
75 Monmouth Street
Brookline, Massachusetts. April 7, [1902?]
Dear Mrs Gardner,
It was a delightful surprise to see your handwriting last night, when I got home and found your kind note and interesting present. It is very good of you to remember me. I haven’t been very well for the last year, and busier every day, and more of a hermit, so that your message seems to bring me up again into the land of the living, and I hope soon to have got enough of my fleshly substance back to become visible in the polite world. Talking of hermits, it occurs to me that you may not have seen another collection of verses of mine with that title—my poetical wastepaper-basket and closing of accounts with the Muses. I send you a copy in case anything in it— perhaps the translation from Théophile Gautier—may interest you. I am proud to see that you have placed my other verses on your honourable list. I wish they were more worthy but I was only a poet by youth, not by genius.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book One, [1868]–1909. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston MA.