Act officiously, not officially
   Confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong
   George William Curtis
   Give him your best wine
   Longfellow
   Love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best
   Made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions
   Motley
   Quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it
   The world is well lost whenever the world is wrong
   Women’s rights

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES—­Literary Boston As I Knew It

by William Dean Howells literary Boston as I knew it

Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston, when I went to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield Republican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitan importance.  I had met him in Venice several years earlier, when he was suffering from the cruel insomnia which had followed his overwork on that newspaper, and when he told me that he was sleeping scarcely more than one hour out of the twenty-four.  His worn face attested the misery which this must have been, and which lasted in some measure while he lived, though I believe that rest and travel relieved him in his later years.  He was always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now expressed a most gratifying interest when I told him what I was going to do in Boston.  He gave himself the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality of the fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was about to share in the destinies of the great literary periodical of New England.

I.

I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the liveliest newspaper man, so much has the West since returned upon the East in a refluent wave of authorship.  But then the West was almost an unknown quality in our literary problem; and in fact there was scarcely any literature outside of New England.  Even this was of New England origin, for it was almost wholly the work of New England men and women in the “splendid exile” of New York.  The Atlantic Monthly, which was distinctively literary, was distinctively a New England magazine, though from the first it had been characterized by what was more national, what was more universal, in the New England temperament.  Its chief contributors for nearly twenty years were Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Emerson, Doctor Hale, Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple, Rose Terry Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Prescott Spofford, Mrs. Phelps Ward, and other New England writers who still lived in New England, and largely in the region of Boston.  Occasionally there came a poem from Bryant, at New York, from Mr. Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and Mrs. Stoddard, from Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor.  But all these, except the last, were not only of New