Spent an hour, yesterday, with A.W.Lamb, who was not married when I saw him last.He married a young lady whom I knew.And now I have been talking with their grown-up sons and daughters.Lieutenant Hickman, the spruce young handsomely-uniformed volunteer of 1846, called on me--a grisly elephantine patriarch of 65 now, his grace all vanished.
That world which I knew in its blossoming youth is old and bowed and melancholy, now; its soft cheeks are leathery and wrinkled, the fire is gone out in its eyes, and the spring from its step.It will be dust and ashes when I come again.I have been clasping hands with the moribund-and usually they said, "It is for the last time."Now I am under way again, upon this hideous trip to St.Paul, with a heart brimming full of thoughts and images of you and Susie and Bay and the peerless Jean.And so good night, my love.
SAML.
Clemens's trip had been saddened by learning, in New Orleans, the news of the death of Dr.John Brown, of Edinburgh.To Doctor Brown's son, whom he had known as "Jock," he wrote immediately on his return to Hartford.
To Mr.John Brown, in Edinburgh HARTFORD, June 1, 1882.
MY DEAR MR.BROWN,--I was three thousand miles from home, at breakfast in New Orleans, when the damp morning paper revealed the sorrowful news among the cable dispatches.There was no place in America, however remote, or however rich, or poor or high or humble where words of mourning for your father were not uttered that morning, for his works had made him known and loved all over the land.To Mrs.Clemens and me, the loss is personal; and our grief the grief one feels for one who was peculiarly near and dear.Mrs.Clemens has never ceased to express regret that we came away from England the last time without going to see him, and often we have since projected a voyage across the Atlantic for the sole purpose of taking him by the hand and looking into his kind eyes once more before he should be called to his rest.
We both thank you greatly for the Edinburgh papers which you sent.My wife and I join in affectionate remembrances and greetings to yourself and your aunt, and in the sincere tender of our sympathies.
Faithfully yours, S.L.CLEMENS.
Our Susie is still "Megalops." He gave her that name:
Can you spare a photograph of your father? We have none but the one taken in a group with ourselves.
William Dean Howells, at the age of forty-five, reached what many still regard his highest point of achievement in American realism.
His novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, which was running as a Century serial during the summer of 1882, attracted wide attention, and upon its issue in book form took first place among his published novels.
Mark Twain, to the end of his life, loved all that Howells wrote.
Once, long afterward, he said: "Most authors give us glimpses of a radiant moon, but Howells's moon shines and sails all night long."When the instalments of The Rise of Silas Lapham began to appear, he overflowed in adjectives, the sincerity of which we need not doubt, in view of his quite open criticisms of the author's reading delivery.
To W.D.Howells, in Belmont, Mass.:
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I am in a state of wild enthusiasm over this July instalment of your story.It's perfectly dazzling--it's masterly--incomparable.Yet I heard you read it--without losing my balance.
Well, the difference between your reading and your writing is-remarkable.
I mean, in the effects produced and the impression left behind.Why, the one is to the other as is one of Joe Twichell's yarns repeated by a somnambulist.Goodness gracious, you read me a chapter, and it is a gentle, pearly dawn, with a sprinkle of faint stars in it; but by and by I strike it in print, and shout to myself, "God bless us, how has that pallid former spectacle been turned into these gorgeous sunset splendors!"Well, I don't care how much you read your truck to me, you can't permanently damage it for me that way.It is always perfectly fresh and dazzling when I come on it in the magazine.Of course I recognize the form of it as being familiar--but that is all.That is, I remember it as pyrotechnic figures which you set up before me, dead and cold, but ready for the match--and now I see them touched off and all ablaze with blinding fires.You can read, if you want to, but you don't read worth a damn.I know you can read, because your readings of Cable and your repeatings of the German doctor's remarks prove that.
That's the best drunk scene--because the truest--that I ever read.There are touches in it that I never saw any writer take note of before.And they are set before the reader with amazing accuracy.How very drunk, and how recently drunk, and how altogether admirably drunk you must have been to enable you to contrive that masterpiece!
Why I didn't notice that that religious interview between Marcia and Mrs.
Halleck was so deliciously humorous when you read it to me--but dear me, it's just too lovely for anything.(Wrote Clark to collar it for the "Library.")Hang it, I know where the mystery is, now; when you are reading, you glide right along, and I don't get a chance to let the things soak home;but when I catch it in the magazine, I give a page 20 or 30 minutes in which to gently and thoroughly filter into me.Your humor is so very subtle, and elusive--(well, often it's just a vanishing breath of perfume which a body isn't certain he smelt till he stops and takes another smell) whereas you can smell other (Remainder obliterated.)Among Mark Twain's old schoolmates in Hannibal was little Helen Kercheval, for whom in those early days he had a very tender spot indeed.But she married another schoolmate, John Garth, who in time became a banker, highly respected and a great influence.John and Helen Garth have already been mentioned in the letter of May 17th.
To John Garth, in Hannibal:
HARTFORD, July 3 '82.
