Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any I have known, the material given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation of clear and solid truth.  At the last day he will not have to confess anything, for all his life was the free knowledge of any one who would ask him of it.  The Searcher of hearts will not bring him to shame at that day, for he did not try to hide any of the things for which he was often so bitterly sorry.  He knew where the Responsibility lay, and he took a man’s share of it bravely; but not the less fearlessly he left the rest of the answer to the God who had imagined men.

It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then left trying.  We had other meetings, insignificantly sad and brief; but the last time I saw him alive was made memorable to me by the kind, clear judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as the sole present help of the weak against the strong.

Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour.  After the voice of his old friend Twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it:  something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him.  Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes—­I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.

ETEXT editor’s bookmarks: 

   Absolute devotion to the day of her death,
   Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful
   Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness
   Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence
   Amuse him, even when they wronged him
   Amusingly realized the situation to their friends
   But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month”
   Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions
   Church:  “Oh yes, I go It ’most kills me, but I go,”
   Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature
   Despair broke in laughter
   Despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology
   Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly
   Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour
   He did not care much for fiction
   He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection