[Remainder missing.]

The dream story was never completed.  It was the same that he had worked on in London, and perhaps again in Switzerland.  It would be tried at other times and in other forms, but it never seemed to accommodate itself to a central idea, so that the good writing in it eventually went to waste.  The short story mentioned, “My Platonic Sweetheart,” a charming, idyllic tale, was not published during Mark Twain’s lifetime.  Two years after his death it appeared in Harper’s Magazine.

The assassination of the Empress of Austria at Geneva was the startling event of that summer.  In a letter to Twichell Clemens presents the tragedy in a few vivid paragraphs.  Later he treated it at some length in a magazine article which, very likely because of personal relations with members of the Austrian court, he withheld from print.  It has since been included in a volume of essays, What Is Man, etc.

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford: 

Kaltenleutgeben, Sep. 13, ’98.  Dear Joe,—­You are mistaken; people don’t send us the magazines.  No —­Harper, Century and McClure do; an example I should like to recommend to other publishers.  And so I thank you very much for sending me Brander’s article.  When you say “I like Brander Matthews; he impresses me as a man of parts and power,” I back you, right up to the hub—­I feel the same way—.  And when you say he has earned your gratitude for cuffing me for my crimes against the Leather stockings and the Vicar, I ain’t making any objection.  Dern your gratitude!

His article is as sound as a nut.  Brander knows literature, and loves it; he can talk about it and keep his temper; he can state his case so lucidly and so fairly and so forcibly that you have to agree with him, even when you don’t agree with him; and he can discover and praise such merits as a book has, even when they are half a dozen diamonds scattered through an acre of mud.  And so he has a right to be a critic.

To detail just the opposite of the above invoice is to describe me.  I haven’t any right to criticise books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them.  I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin.

That good and unoffending lady the Empress is killed by a mad-man, and I am living in the midst of world-history again.  The Queen’s jubilee last year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the police, and now this murder, which will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from now.  To have a personal friend of the wearer of the crown burst in at the gate in the deep dusk of the evening and say in a voice broken with tears, “My God the Empress is murdered,” and fly toward her home before we can utter a question-why, it brings the giant event home to you, makes you a part of it and personally interested; it is as if your neighbor Antony should come flying and say “Caesar is butchered—­the head of the world is fallen!”