Sigmund Freud was a prolific letter writer. In a letter he wrote to Eduard Silberstein, his adolescent confidant and periodic correspondent while pursuing their respective University studies, he extolled a composition of Bret Harte which might have been especially salient to the twenty-one-year-old Freud's own contemporaneous ‘lot in life.’ How it could have served as a palliative for his persistent contemplation of morbid thoughts may be found in Max Schur's analysis of a segment of the aged Freud's correspondence with Marie Bonaparte six decades later.