Dear babe, whose fiftieth year to-day
Your ripe half-century rounded,
Your books the precious draught betray
The laughing Nine compounded.

So mixed the sweet, the sharp, the strong,
Each finds its faults amended,
The virtues that to each belong
In happiest union blended.

And what the flavor can surpass
Of sugar, spirit, lemons? 
So while one health fills every glass
Mark Twain for Baby Clemens!

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Frank R. Stockton, Charles Dudley Warner, and Joel Chandler Harris sent pleasing letters.  Warner said: 

You may think it an easy thing to be fifty years old, but you will
find it’s not so easy to stay there, and your next fifty years will
slip away much faster than those just accomplished.

Many wrote letters privately, of course, and Andrew Lang, like Holmes, sent a poem that has a special charm.

For mark twain

To brave Mark Twain, across the sea,
The years have brought his jubilee. 
One hears it, half in pain,
That fifty years have passed and gone
Since danced the merry star that shone
Above the babe Mark Twain.

We turn his pages and we see
The Mississippi flowing free;
We turn again and grin
O’er all Tom Sawyer did and planned
With him of the ensanguined hand,
With Huckleberry Finn!

Spirit of Mirth, whose chime of bells
Shakes on his cap, and sweetly swells
Across the Atlantic main,
Grant that Mark’s laughter never die,
That men through many a century
May chuckle o’er Mark Twain!

Assuredly Mark Twain was made happy by these attentions; to Dr. Holmes he wrote: 

Dear Dr. Holmes,—­I shall never be able to tell you the half of how proud you have made me.  If I could you would say you were nearly paid for the trouble you took.  And then the family:  If I could convey the electrical surprise and gratitude and exaltation of the wife and the children last night, when they happened upon that Critic where I had, with artful artlessness, spread it open and retired out of view to see what would happen—­well, it was great and fine and beautiful to see, and made me feel as the victor feels when the shouting hosts march by:  and if you also could have seen it you would have said the account was squared.  For I have brought them up in your company, as in the company of a warm and friendly and beneficent but far-distant sun; and so, for you to do this thing was for the sun to send down out of the skies the miracle of a special ray and transfigure me before their faces.  I knew what that poem would be to them; I knew it would raise me up to remote and shining heights in their eyes, to very fellowship with the chambered Nautilus itself, and that from that fellowship they could never more dissociate me while they should live; and so I made sure to be by when the surprise should come.