1891/1/prior to the 12th: Ebenezer to Agnes

This is the first surviving letter between Ebenezer and Agnes, the beginning of which is missing. Ebenezer discusses his poem about a murder, his current reading, and his impressions of early Calgary.

…sensational and un-scientific side of the scheme, cuts and carves and makes mince-meat of it to a marvel. Some of his expressions are distinctly good. What could be better as applied to the Salvation Army than “corybantic Christianity”¹?

When your letter of the 19th December reached me, with its legitimate strictness on some of Sims’s ballads², I was finishing a “screed” of verses--In the Condemned Cell--the outpourings of a woman convicted of child-murder. I intended in these verses to draw attention to a glaring de::fect in the English com-law³, and send the production to Blackwood’s Magazine⁴, but your criticism has frightened me so far as these verses are con::cerned into inaction! You see what an influence you are! Some fractionlets of recent verse I shall send you some of these January days.

Since the holidays began I have been wonderfully busy, and now that, so far as my own work is concerned, I am getting the rope tight I intend to keep it so. M. Taine’s somewhat materialistic Eng…