We may wish that he had left us a chapter of that idyllic journey, but it will never be written now.  A night or two before the vessel reached New York there was the usual good-by assembly, and for this occasion, at Mrs. Severance’s request, Mark Twain wrote some verses.  They were not especially notable, for meter and rhyme did not come easy to him, but one prophetic stanza is worth remembering.  In the opening lines the passengers are referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows: 

       Lo! other ships of that parted fleet
       Shall suffer this fate or that: 
       One shall be wrecked, another shall sink,
       Or ground on treacherous flat. 
       Some shall be famed in many lands
       As good ships, fast and fair,
       And some shall strangely disappear,
       Men know not when or where.

The Quaker City returned to America on November 19, 1867, and Mark Twain found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide repute.  The fifty-three letters to the Alta and the half-dozen to the New York Tribune had carried his celebrity into every corner of the States and Territories.  Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry, they came as a revelation to a public weary of the driveling, tiresome travel-letters of that period.  They preached a new gospel in travel-literature:  the gospel of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a gospel of sincerity in according praises to whatever seemed genuine, and ridicule to the things considered sham.  It was the gospel that Mark Twain would continue to preach during his whole career.  It became his chief literary message to the world-a world waiting for that message.

Moreover, the letters were literature.  He had received, from whatever source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a loftier conception and expression.  It was at Tangier that he first struck the grander chord, the throbbing cadence of human story.

Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America; old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and his paladins beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and his disciples walked the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes.

This is pure poetry.  He had never touched so high a strain before, but he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing mastery and confidence.  In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain, the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx.  We cannot forego a paragraph or two of that word-picture: