Of Literature | Page 5

England in quality.
While I was doing these sketches, sometimes slighter and sometimes
less slight, of all those poets and essayists and novelists I had known in
Cambridge and Boston and Concord and New York, I was doing many
other things: half a dozen novels, as many more novelettes and shorter
stories, with essays and criticisms and verses; so that in January, 1900,
I had not yet done the paper on Lowell, which, with another, was to
complete my reminiscences of American literary life as I had witnessed
it. When they were all done at last they were republished in a volume
which found instant favor beyond my deserts if not its own.
There was a good deal of trouble with the name, but Literary Friends
and Acquaintance was an endeavor for modest accuracy with which I
remained satisfied until I thought, long too late, of Literary Friends and
Neighbors. Then I perceived that this would have been still more
accurate and quite as modest, and I gladly give any reader leave to call
the book by that name who likes.
Since the collection was first made, I have written little else quite of the
kind, except the paper on Bret Harte, which was first printed shortly
after his death; and the study of Mark Twain, which I had been
preparing 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.

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE--My First Visit to
New England

MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
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