I find this young man worthy
   If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be
   If he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his
   In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal
   Incredible in their insipidity
   Industrial slavery
   Lincoln
   Love of freedom and the hope of justice
   Lowell
   Man who had so much of the boy in him
   Men who took themselves so seriously as that need
   Met with kindness, if not honor
   Might so far forget myself as to be a novelist
   Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps
   Never paid in anything but hopes of paying
   Not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality
   Odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission
   Praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place
   Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century
   Remember the dinner-bell
   Seen through the wrong end of the telescope
   Stoddard
   Things common to all, however peculiar in each
   Thoreau
   Visited one of the great mills
   Welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness
   Wit that tries its teeth upon everything

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES—­Roundabout to Boston

by William Dean Howells roundabout to Boston

During the four years of my life in Venice the literary intention was present with me at all times and in all places.  I wrote many things in verse, which I sent to the magazines in every part of the English-speaking world, but they came unerringly back to me, except in three instances only, when they were kept by the editors who finally printed them.  One of these pieces was published in the Atlantic Monthly; another in Harpers Magazine; the third was got into the New York Ledger through the kindness of Doctor Edward Everett Hale, who used I know not what mighty magic to that end.  I had not yet met him; but he interested himself in my ballad as if it had been his own.  His brother, Charles Hale, later Consul-General for Egypt, whom I saw almost every moment of the two visits he paid Venice in my time, had sent it to him, after copying it in his own large, fair hand, so that it could be read.  He was not quite of that literary Boston which I so fondly remembered my glimpses of; he was rather of a journalistic and literary Boston which I had never known; but he was of Boston, after all.  He had been in Lowell’s classes at Harvard; he had often met Longfellow in Cambridge; he knew Doctor Holmes, of course; and he let me talk of my idols to my heart’s content.  I think he must have been amused by my raptures; most people would have been; but he was kind and patient, and he listened to me with a sweet intelligence which I shall always gratefully remember.  He died too young, with his life’s possibilities mainly unfulfilled; but none who knew him could fail to imagine them, or to love him for what he was.