Of Literature | Page 4

sample the author's ideas
before making an entire meal of them. D.W.]

"OF LITERATURE"
The Project Gutenberg Anthology of the Literary Essays of Howells

Literary Friends And Acquaintance Literature And Life [Studies] My
Literary Passions/Criticism & Fiction

CONTENTS: Literary Friends and Acquaintances Biographical My
First Visit to New England First Impressions of Literary New York
Roundabout to Boston Literary Boston As I Knew It Oliver Wendell
Holmes The White Mr. Longfellow Studies of Lowell Cambridge
Neighbors A Belated Guest My Mark Twain
Literature and Life Man of Letters in Business Confessions of a
Summer Colonist The Young Contributor Last Days in a Dutch Hotel
Anomalies of the Short Story Spanish Prisoners of War American
Literary Centers Standard Household Effect Co. Notes of a Vanished
Summer Worries of a Winter Walk Summer Isles of Eden Wild
Flowers of the Asphalt A Circus in the Suburbs A She Hamlet The
Midnight Platoon The Beach at Rockaway Sawdust in the Arena At a
Dime Museum American Literature in Exile The Horse Show The
Problem of the Summer Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago
From New York into New England The Art of the Adsmith The
Psychology of Plagiarism Puritanism in American Fiction The What
and How in Art Politics in American Authors Storage "Floating down
the River on the O-hi-o"
My Literary Passions The Bookcase at Home Goldsmith Cervantes
Irving First Fiction and Drama Longfellow's "Spanish Student" Scott
Lighter Fancies Pope Various Preferences Uncle Tom's Cabin Ossian
Shakespeare Ik Marvel Dickens Wordsworth, Lowell, Chaucer
Macaulay. Critics and Reviews. A Non-literary Episode Thackeray
"Lazarillo De Tormes" Curtis, Longfellow, Schlegel Tennyson Heine
De Quincey, Goethe, Longfellow. George Eliot, Hawthorne, Goethe,
Heine Charles Reade Dante Goldoni, Manzoni, D'azeglio "Pastor
Fido," "Aminta," "Romola," "Yeast," "Paul Ferroll" Erckmann-chatrian,
Bjorstjerne Bjornson Tourguenief, Auerbach Certain Preferences and
Experiences Valdes, Galdos, Verga, Zola, Trollope, Hardy Tolstoy
Criticism and Fiction

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES
by William Dean Howells

CONTENTS:
Biographical My First Visit to New England First Impressions of
Literary New York Roundabout to Boston Literary Boston As I Knew
It Oliver Wendell Holmes The White Mr. Longfellow Studies of
Lowell Cambridge Neighbors A Belated Guest My Mark Twain

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--First Visit to New
England

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
Long before I began the papers which make up this volume, I had
meant to write of literary history in New England as I had known it in
the lives of its great exemplars during the twenty-five years I lived near
them. In fact, I had meant to do this from the time I came among them;
but I let the days in which I almost constantly saw them go by without
record save such as I carried in a memory retentive, indeed, beyond the
common, but not so full as I could have wished when I began to invoke
it for my work. Still, upon insistent appeal, it responded in sufficient
abundance; and, though I now wish I could have remembered more
instances, I think my impressions were accurate enough. I am sure of
having tried honestly to impart them in the ten years or more when I
was desultorily endeavoring to share them with the reader.
The papers were written pretty much in the order they have here,
beginning with My First Visit to New England, which dates from the
earliest eighteen-nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading it
from the manuscript to the editor of Harper's Magazine, where we lay
under the willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the
first years of that decade. It was printed no great while after in that
periodical; but I was so long in finishing the study of Lowell that it had
been anticipated in Harper's by other reminiscences of him, and it was
therefore first printed in Scribner's Magazine. It was the paper with
which I took the most pains, and when it was completed I still felt it so
incomplete that I referred it to his closest and my best friend, the late
Charles Eliot Norton, for his criticism. He thought it wanting in unity;
it was a group of studies instead of one study, he said; I must do

something to draw the different sketches together in a single effect of
portraiture; and this I did my best to do.
It was the latest written of the three articles which give the volume
substance, and it represents mare finally and fully than the others my
sense of the literary importance of the men whose like we shall not
look upon again. Longfellow was easily the greatest poet of the three,
Holmes often the most brilliant and felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of
his forays in politics, was the finest scholar and the most profoundly
literary, as he was above the others most deeply and thoroughly New