ETEXT editor’s bookmarks: 

   Cold-slaw
   Collective opacity
   Expectation of those who will come no more
   Felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault
   Found life was not all poetry
   He had no time to make money
   Intellectual poseurs
   No time to make money
   NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less
   One could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame
   Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it
   Standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them
   Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES—­A Belated Guest

by William Dean Howells A belated guest

It is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of things finds compensation in the privilege, however undisputed by his contemporaries, of recording his memories of it.  This is, in the first two or three instances, a pleasure.  It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by the fire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the past; and if the Absences thus entreated to become Presences are those of famous people, they lend to the fond historian a little of their lustre, in which he basks for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity.  But another time comes, and comes very soon, when the pensive pleasure changes to the pain of duty, and the precious privilege converts itself into a grievous obligation.  You are unable to choose your company among those immortal shades; if one, why not another, where all seem to have a right to such gleams of this ‘dolce lome’ as your reminiscences can shed upon them?  Then they gather so rapidly, as the years pass, in these pale realms, that one, if one continues to survive, is in danger of wearing out such welcome, great or small, as met ones recollections in the first two or three instances, if one does one’s duty by each.  People begin to say, and not without reason, in a world so hurried and wearied as this:  “Ah, here he is again with his recollections!” Well, but if the recollections by some magical good-fortune chance to concern such a contemporary of his as, say, Bret Harte, shall not he be partially justified, or at least excused?

I.

My recollections of Bret Harte begin with the arrest, on the Atlantic shore, of that progress of his from the Pacific Slope, which, in the simple days of 1871, was like the progress of a prince, in the universal attention and interest which met and followed it.  He was indeed a prince, a fairy prince in whom every lover of his novel and enchanting art felt a patriotic property, for his promise and performance in those earliest tales of ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’, and ‘Tennessee’s Partner’, and ‘Maggles’, and ‘The Outcasts of Poker Flat’, were the earnests of an American literature to come.