“I never greatly envied anybody but the dead,” he said, when he had looked at her.  “I always envy the dead.”

The coveted estate of silence, time’s only absolute gift, it was the one benefaction he had ever considered worth while.

Yet the years were not unkindly to Mark Twain.  They brought him sorrow, but they brought him likewise the capacity and opportunity for large enjoyment, and at the last they laid upon him a kind of benediction.  Naturally impatient, he grew always more gentle, more generous, more tractable and considerate as the seasons passed.  His final days may be said to have been spent in the tranquil light of a summer afternoon.

His own end followed by a few months that of his daughter.  There were already indications that his heart was seriously affected, and soon after Jean’s death he sought the warm climate of Bermuda.  But his malady made rapid progress, and in April he returned to Stormfield.  He died there just a week later, April 21, 1910.

Any attempt to designate Mark Twain’s place in the world’s literary history would be presumptuous now.  Yet I cannot help thinking that he will maintain his supremacy in the century that produced him.  I think so because, of all the writers of that hundred years, his work was the most human his utterances went most surely to the mark.  In the long analysis of the ages it is the truth that counts, and he never approximated, never compromised, but pronounced those absolute verities to which every human being of whatever rank must instantly respond.

His understanding of subjective human nature—­the vast, unwritten life within—­was simply amazing.  Such knowledge he acquired at the fountainhead—­that is, from himself.  He recognized in himself an extreme example of the human being with all the attributes of power and of weakness, and he made his exposition complete.

The world will long miss Mark Twain; his example and his teaching will be neither ignored nor forgotten.  Genius defies the laws of perspective and looms larger as it recedes.  The memory of Mark Twain remains to us a living and intimate presence that today, even more than in life, constitutes a stately moral bulwark reared against hypocrisy and superstition—­a mighty national menace to sham.

MarkTwain’s letters

I

EARLY LETTERS, 1853.  NEW YORK AND PHILADELPHIA

We have no record of Mark Twain’s earliest letters.  Very likely they were soiled pencil notes, written to some school sweetheart —­to “Becky Thatcher,” perhaps—­and tossed across at lucky moments, or otherwise, with happy or disastrous results.  One of those smudgy, much-folded school notes of the Tom Sawyer period would be priceless to-day, and somewhere among forgotten keepsakes it may exist, but we shall not be likely to find it.  No letter of his boyhood, no scrap of his earlier writing,