[This last paragraph reminds one again that, as with Holmes:  a great poet writes the best prose.  D.W.]

ETEXT editor’s bookmarks: 

   Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution
   Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything
   Couldn’t fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer
   Death’s vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life
   Dollars were of so much farther flight than now
   Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself
   Express the appreciation of another’s fit word
   Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years
   Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life
   His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends
   His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it
   Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there
   Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel
   Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other
   Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller
   Now death has come to join its vague conjectures
   Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague
   Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned
   So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California
   Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES—­My Mark Twain

by William Dean Howells my mark Twain

I.

It was in the little office of James T. Fields, over the bookstore of Ticknor & Fields, at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, that I first met my friend of now forty-four years, Samuel L. Clemens.  Mr. Fields was then the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I was his proud and glad assistant, with a pretty free hand as to manuscripts, and an unmanacled command of the book-notices at the end of the magazine.  I wrote nearly all of them myself, and in 1869 I had written rather a long notice of a book just winning its way to universal favor.  In this review I had intimated my reservations concerning the ‘Innocents Abroad’, but I had the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had not had before.  I forget just what I said in praise of it, and it does not matter; it is enough that I praised it enough to satisfy the author.  He now signified as much, and he stamped his gratitude into my memory with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here.  Throughout my long acquaintance with him his graphic touch was always allowing itself a freedom which I cannot bring my fainter pencil to illustrate.  He had the Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one’s self prudish; and I was often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them.  I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost will not suffer me the word, then he was Baconian.