Mark Twain had a few books that he read regularly every year or two.  Among these were ‘Pepys’s Diary’, Suetonius’s ’Lives of the Twelve Caesars’, and Thomas Carlyle’s ‘French Revolution’.  He had a passion for history, biography, and personal memoirs of any sort.  In his early life he had cared very little for poetry, but along in the middle eighties he somehow acquired a taste for Browning and became absorbed in it.  A Browning club assembled as often as once a week at the Clemens home in Hartford to listen to his readings of the master.  He was an impressive reader, and he carefully prepared himself for these occasions, indicating by graduated underscorings, the exact values he wished to give to words and phrases.  Those were memorable gatherings, and they must have continued through at least two winters.  It is one of the puzzling phases of Mark Twain’s character that, notwithstanding his passion for direct and lucid expression, he should have found pleasure in the poems of Robert Browning.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

Elmira, Aug. 22, ’87.  My dear Howells,—­How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man while he sleeps.  When I finished Carlyle’s French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment (and Taine and St. Simon):  and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!—­And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat.  Carlyle teaches no such gospel so the change is in me—­in my vision of the evidences.

People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at all former milestones in their journey.  I wonder how they can lie so.  It comes of practice, no doubt.  They would not say that of Dickens’s or Scott’s books.  Nothing remains the same.  When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk:  there is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for.  Shrunk how?  Why, to its correct dimensions:  the house hasn’t altered; this is the first time it has been in focus.

Well, that’s loss.  To have house and Bible shrink so, under the disillusioning corrected angle, is loss-for a moment.  But there are compensations.  You tilt the tube skyward and bring planets and comets and corona flames a hundred and fifty thousand miles high into the field.  Which I see you have done, and found Tolstoi.  I haven’t got him in focus yet, but I’ve got Browning . . . . 
                                   Ys Ever
          
                                   mark.