11.  Did he use the right word only when he couldn’t think of
    another one, or did he run so much to wrong words because he didn’t
    know the right one when he saw it?

    12.  Can you read him and keep your respect for him?  Of course a
    person could in his day—­an era of sentimentality & sloppy
    romantics—­but land! can a body do it to-day?

Brander, I lie here dying; slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter.  I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, & as far as Chapter xix of Guy Mannering, & I can no longer hold my head up or take my nourishment.  Lord, it’s all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; & such wax figures & skeletons & specters.  Interest?  Why, it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk-&-water humbugs.  And oh, the poverty of invention!  Not poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons for them.  Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges for a situation—­elaborates & elaborates & elaborates till, if you live to get to it, you don’t believe in it when it happens.

    I can’t find the rest of Rob Roy, I, can’t stand any more Mannering
    —­I do not know just what to do, but I will reflect, & not quit this
    great study rashly ....

    My, I wish I could see you & Leigh Hunt!

    Sincerely yours,

S. L. Clemens.

But a few days later he experienced a revelation.  It came when he perseveringly attacked still a third work of Scott—­Quentin Durward.  Hastily he wrote to Matthews again: 

I’m still in bed, but the days have lost their dullness since I broke into Sir Walter & lost my temper.  I finished Guy Mannering that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows gibbering around a single flesh-&-blood being—­Dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the very refuse of the romance artist’s stage properties—­finished it & took up Quentin Durward & finished that.

It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living; it was like withdrawing from the infant class in the college of journalism to sit under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University.

I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward?—­[This letter, enveloped, addressed, and stamped, was evidently mislaid.  It was found and mailed seven years later, June, 1910 message from the dead.]

Among other books which he read that winter and spring was Helen Keller’s ‘The Story of My Life’, then recently published.  That he finished it in a mood of sweet gentleness we gather from a long, lovely letter which he wrote her—­a letter in which he said: 

I am charmed with your book—­enchanted.  You are a wonderful creature, the most wonderful in the world—­you and your other half together—­Miss Sullivan, I mean—­for it took the pair of you to make a complete & perfect whole.  How she stands out in her letters! her brilliancy, penetration, originality, wisdom, character, & the fine literary competencies of her pen—­they are all there.