Literary Friends and Acquaintance | Page 2

to make for forty years and more, and wrote in two weeks of
the spring of 1910. Others of my time and place have now passed
whither there is neither time nor place, and there are moments when I
feel that I must try to call them back and pay them such honor as my

sense of their worth may give; but the impulse has as yet failed to effect
itself, and I do not know how long I shall spare myself the supreme
pleasure-pain, the "hochst angenehmer Schmerz," of seeking to live
here with those who live here no more.
W. D. H.

MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND

I.
If there was any one in the world who had his being more wholly in
literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have known where
to find him, and I doubt if he could have been found nearer the centres
of literary activity than I then was, or among those more purely devoted
to literature than myself. I had been for three years a writer of news
paragraphs, book notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an
inland city, and I do not know that my life differed outwardly from that
of any other young journalist, who had begun as I had in a country
printing-office, and might be supposed to be looking forward to
advancement in his profession or in public affairs. But inwardly it was
altogether different with me. Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to be
anything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far
forget myself as to be a novelist. I was, with my friend J. J. Piatt, the
half-author of a little volume of very unknown verse, and Mr. Lowell
had lately accepted and had begun to print in the Atlantic Monthly five
or six poems of mine. Besides this I had written poems, and sketches,
and criticisms for the Saturday Press of New York, a long-forgotten but
once very lively expression of literary intention in an extinct bohemia
of that city; and I was always writing poems, and sketches, and
criticisms in our own paper. These, as well as my feats in the renowned
periodicals of the East, met with kindness, if not honor, in my own city
which ought to have given me grave doubts whether I was any real
prophet. But it only intensified my literary ambition, already so strong
that my veins might well have run ink rather than blood, and gave me a

higher opinion of my fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be. They
were indeed very charming people, and such of them as I mostly saw
were readers and lovers of books. Society in Columbus at that day had
a pleasant refinement which I think I do not exaggerate in the fond
retrospect. It had the finality which it seems to have had nowhere since
the war; it had certain fixed ideals, which were none the less graceful
and becoming because they were the simple old American ideals, now
vanished, or fast vanishing, before the knowledge of good and evil as
they have it in Europe, and as it has imparted itself to American travel
and sojourn. There was a mixture of many strains in the capital of Ohio,
as there was throughout the State. Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania,
New York, and New England all joined to characterize the manners and
customs. I suppose it was the South which gave the social tone; the
intellectual taste among the elders was the Southern taste for the classic
and the standard in literature; but we who were younger preferred the
modern authors: we read Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Hawthorne,
and Charles Reade, and De Quincey, and Tennyson, and Browning, and
Emerson, and Longfellow, and I--I read Heine, and evermore Heine,
when there was not some new thing from the others. Now and then an
immediate French book penetrated to us: we read Michelet and About,
I remember. We looked to England and the East largely for our literary
opinions; we accepted the Saturday Review as law if we could not quite
receive it as gospel. One of us took the Cornhill Magazine, because
Thackeray was the editor; the Atlantic Monthly counted many readers
among us; and a visiting young lady from New England, who screamed
at sight of the periodical in one of our houses, "Why, have you got the
Atlantic Monthly out here?" could be answered, with cold superiority,
"There are several contributors to the Atlantic in Columbus." There
were in fact two: my room-mate, who wrote Browning for it, while I
wrote Heine and Longfellow. But I suppose two are as rightfully
several as twenty are.

II.
That was the heyday of