Moreover, it is writ-
ten with that marvelous clearness of diction, that easy command of
current idiom, which constitute Howells's strongest claim to a great
style.
ten with that marvelous clearness of diction, that easy command of
current idiom, which constitute Howells's strongest claim to a great
style.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v13 - Her to Hux
A poem sent to him
for criticism by Elizabeth Barrett opened
the way to a cordial friendship and a cor-
respondence of seven years. These delight-
ful letters were published in 1877. Mrs.
Browning contributed to Horne's 'Poems of
Geoffrey Chaucer Modernized,' and wrote
several essays for his 'Spirit of the Age,'
a collection of criticisms published in 1844.
In 1852 Horne removed to Australia, and remained there until
1866; his book 'Australian Facts and Principles' was one outcome
of this residence. Again returning to England, he continued literary
work until his death at Margate, March 13th, 1884. His last works
were tragedies, including 'Judas Iscariot: A Miracle-Play,' and a
curious prose tract, Sithron the Star-Stricken' (1883), which he pre-
tended to take from the Arabian.
"
R. H. H. HORNE
Poe said that his 'Orion' might be called " a homily against
supineness and apathy in the cause of human progress, and in favor
of energetic action for the good of the race.
It is our delib-
erate opinion," he affirmed, "that in all that regards the loftiest and
holiest attributes of true poetry, 'Orion' has never been excelled. "
## p. 7642 (#452) ###########################################
7642
RICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE
The narrative is drawn from a number of Greek and Roman fables.
It describes the giant hunter Orion, who is loved by Artemis (Diana),
Merope, and Eos (Aurora). The jealous Artemis pierces him with her
arrows; but Zeus, in answer to the prayers of Eos, places him among
the constellations, where he may enjoy her affection forever.
MORNING
From Orion'
L
EVEL with the summit of that eastern mount
By slow approach, and like a promontory
Which seems to glide and meet a coming ship,
The pale-gold platform of the morning came
Towards the gliding mount. Against a sky
Of delicate purple, snow-bright courts and halls
Touched with light silvery green, gleaming across,
Fronted by pillars vast, cloud-capitaled,
With shafts of changeful pearl, all reared upon
An isle of clear aerial gold, came floating;
And in the centre, clad in fleecy white,
With lucid lilies in her golden hair,
Eos, sweet Goddess of the Morning, stood.
From the bright peak of that surrounded mount,
One step sufficed to gain the tremulous floor
Whereon the Palace of the Morning shone,
Scarcely a bow-shot distant; but that step
Orion's humbled and still mortal feet
Dared not adventure. In the Goddess's face
Imploringly he gazed. "Advance! " she said,
In tones more sweet than when some heavenly bird,
Hid in a rosy cloud, its morning hymn
Warbles unseen, wet with delicious dews,
And to earth's flowers all looking up in prayer,
"Believe-advance! —
Tells of the coming bliss.
Or, as the spheres move onward with their song
That calls me to awaken other lands,
That moment will escape which ne'er returns! »
Forward Orion stepped: the platform bright
Shook like the reflex of a star in water
Moved by the breeze, throughout its whole expanse;
And even the palace glistened fitfully,
As with electric shiver it sent forth
Odors of flowers divine and all fresh life.
## p. 7643 (#453) ###########################################
RICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE
7643
Still stood he where he stepped, nor to return
Attempted. To essay one pace beyond
He felt no power; yet onward he advanced
Safe to the Goddess, who, with hand outstretched,
Into the palace led him. Grace and strength,
With sense of happy change to finer earth,
Freshness of nature and belief in good,
Came flowing o'er his soul, and he was blest.
'Tis always morning somewhere in the world,
And Eos rises, circling constantly
The varied regions of mankind. No pause
Of renovation and of freshening rays
She knows; but evermore her love breathes forth
On field and forest, as on human hope,
Health, beauty, power, thought, action, and advance.
All this Orion witnessed, and rejoiced.
The turmoil he had known, the late distress
By loss of passion's object and of sight,
Were now exchanged for these serene delights
Of contemplation, as the influence
That Eos wrought around forever, dawned
Upon his vision and his inmost heart
In sweetness and success. All sympathy
With all fair things that in her circle lay,
She gave, and all received; nor knew of strife:
For from the Sun her cheek its bloom withdrew,
And ere intolerant noon, the floating realm
Of Eos-queen of the awakening earth
Was brightening other lands, wherefrom black Night
Her faded chariot down the sky had driven
Behind the sea. Thus from the earth upraised,
And over its tumultuous breast sustained
In peace and tranquil glory,- oh blest state!
Clear-browed Orion, full of thankfulness
And pure devotion to the goddess, dwelt
Within the glowing Palace of the Morn.
But these serene airs did not therefore bring
A death-sleep o'er the waves of memory,
Where all its clouds and colors, specks of sails,
Its car-borne gods, shipwrecks, and drowning men,
Passed full in view; yet with a mellowing sense
Ideal, and from pain sublimed. Thus came
Mirrors of nature to him, and full oft
Downward on Chios turned his happy eyes,
## p. 7644 (#454) ###########################################
7644
RICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE
With grateful thoughts that o'er life's sorrows wove
The present texture of a sweet content,
Passing all wisdom, or its fairest flower.
He saw the woods, and blessed them for the sake
Of Artemis; the city, and rich gloom
That o'er the cedar forest ever hung,
He also blessed for Merope; the isle
And all that dwelt there, he with smiles beheld.
## p. 7645 (#455) ###########################################
7645
JULIA WARD HOWE
(1819? -)
B
Y BIRTH a member of a fashionable New York circle; by edu-
cation a cultivated and accomplished woman of society; by
marriage made one of a group of zealous and uncompromis-
ing philanthropists,-abolitionists, prison reformers, equal-suffragists,
coeducationists, - Mrs. Julia Ward Howe has turned her eclectic train-
ing only to generous uses. She has published verse, travels, and
essays; she has taught - if much serious and eloquent journalistic
work may be reckoned among the higher forms of teaching; she has
won much reputation as a public speaker
on social, educational, and political subjects;
and it is not impossible that even had she
written nothing, her brilliant fame as a con-
versationist, and as the most inspiring of
companions, might insure her that vague
though sure renown which belongs to the
famous French hostesses of the seventeenth
century.
JULIA WARD HOWE
The New York of her youth was still a
neighborly city, where the small set of cul-
tivated and leisurely families saw much not
only of each other, but of the agreeable
foreigners who came to this country. Her
father, Samuel Ward, was a well-known
banker, to whom all notable persons brought letters of introduction,
and in whose household the young people learned to be agreeable, to
be alert, and to adjust their mental vision to an ever-widening hori-
zon. Mrs. Ward, a very cultivated woman, was herself a poet of some
merit, whose poems, never published, were greatly admired in private
circles. The clever second daughter took profit from all her experi-
ences, read everything that came in her way, attacked with energy
Latin and German,- a knowledge of languages being then generally
deemed superfluous if not disastrous in what was known as "female
education," and when still in short dresses wrote reams of verse.
Her wise elders, however, while encouraging her literary tastes, per-
mitted none of this intellectual green fruit to find a market.
She had been a New York belle for two or three seasons when her
marriage with Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, of Boston, placed her in a
## p. 7646 (#456) ###########################################
7646
JULIA WARD HOWE
new world. This eminent philanthropist, then in the prime of middle
age, had devoted his whole life to the unfortunate. When hardly out
of college and medical school he had enlisted as a volunteer in the
cause of Greek Independence in the revolution of 1824,-the contest
to which Lord Byron gave his life; out of untrained material he had
created an excellent surgical corps for the insurgents; at the declara-
tion of peace he had established an industrial colony on the Isthmus
of Corinth; in 1830 he had served as president of a relief committee
in the Polish uprising, and been imprisoned in Prussia for his pains:
he had founded in South Boston the first American institution for the
instruction of the blind; and he was among the most efficient of the
antislavery crusaders. The friends who surrounded him took life and
themselves very seriously, and all sorts of causes came to the Howe
abode to be justified and adopted.
«<
Mrs. Howe's nature responded generously to these new demands.
She became the eager advocate of the oppressed, whether victims of
the law like the slave, of political tyranny like the Irish, the Poles,
or the Hungarians, or of public opinion,-as, to her thinking, were
all women. Her ready pen was always at service of her many
clients. But she found time to study French, Greek, and Italian, and
to devote herself to modern philosophy, working hard at Schelling,
Hegel, Fichte, Spinoza, and Kant. She wrote philosophical lectures.
which she read at her own house, and she helped to establish philo-
sophical clubs. With her husband she edited an able antislavery
paper, the Boston Commonwealth, to which she contributed leaders,
essays, poems, letters, and witty comments. In the ten or twelve
years following 1854 she published three volumes of poems,-'Passion
Flowers,' 'Words for the Hour,' and 'Later Lyrics'; two books of
travel, 'A Trip to Cuba' and 'From the Oak to the Olive'; and a
drama, 'The World's Own'; having written also in the same period
hundreds of clever newspaper letters to the New York Tribune and
the Anti-Slavery Standard. Since 1881 she has published 'Modern
Society,' a 'Life of Margaret Fuller,' and a second volume of essays,
entitled 'Is Polite Society Polite? ' She has chosen to include within
covers only a small part of her writings, nor does even their whole
bulk represent the life work of this versatile and public-spirited
author. She inspired the prosperous New England Women's Club, the
pioneer of its kind in America. She was a delegate to the World's
Prison Reform Congress in London, in 1872, and helped to found the
Women's Peace Association. She was president of the women's
branch of the great New Orleans Exposition in 1884, and she has
presided over innumerable clubs, conventions, and congresses.
Notwithstanding this enormous activity and productiveness, her
own countrymen associate her name almost wholly with one poem,
## p. 7647 (#457) ###########################################
JULIA WARD HOWE
7647
'The Battle Hymn of the Republic'; a poem struck off at white heat
early in the Civil War, when, in the camps about Washington, Mrs.
Howe was thrilled by the marching of thousands of gallant young
soldiers to the martial air of John Brown's Body. ' The regiments
caught up with enthusiasm the new words which she set to the
familiar tune; and the 'Battle Hymn' was sung in camp and field,
from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico. It became the Marseillaise of the
unemotional Yankee.
[All the following poems are taken from 'Later Lyrics,' copyright 1865, and
are reprinted by permission of Lee & Shepard, publishers, Boston. ]
BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC
INE eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
M
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are
stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on. "
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat:
Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on!
OUR ORDERS
´EAVE no more silks, ye Lyons looms,
To deck our girls for gay delights!
The crimson flower of battle blooms,
And solemn marches fill the nights.
WEA
## p. 7648 (#458) ###########################################
7648
JULIA WARD HOWE
Weave but the flag whose bars to-day
Drooped heavy o'er our early dead,
And homely garments, coarse and gray,
For orphans that must earn their bread!
Keep back your tunes, ye viols sweet,
That poured delight from other lands!
Rouse there the dancer's restless feet;
The trumpet leads our warrior bands.
And ye that wage the war of words
With mystic fame and subtle power,
Go, chatter to the idle birds,
Or teach the lesson of the hour!
Ye Sibyl Arts, in one stern knot
Be all your offices combined!
Stand close, while Courage draws the lot,
The destiny of human kind.
And if that destiny could fail,
The sun should darken in the sky,
The eternal bloom of Nature pale,
And God, and Truth, and Freedom die!
PARDON
PAIN
AINS the sharp sentence the breast in whose wrath it was uttered.
Now thou art cold;
Vengeance the headlong, and justice with purpose close muttered,
Loosen their hold.
Death brings atonement; he did that whereof ye accuse him,—
Murder accurst;
But, from the crisis of crime in which Satan did lose him,
Suffered the worst,
Harshly the red dawn arose on a deed of his doing,
Never to mend;
But harsher days he wore out in the bitter pursuing
And the wild end.
To lift the pale flag of truce, wrap those mysteries round him.
In whose avail
Madness that moved, and the swift retribution that found him,
Falter and fail.
## p. 7649 (#459) ###########################################
JULIA WARD HOWE
7649
So the soft purples that quiet the heavens with mourning,
Willing to fall,
Lend him one fold, his illustrious victim adorning
With wider pall.
Back to the cross, where the Savior, uplifted in dying,
Bade all souls live,
Turns the reft bosom of Nature, his mother, low sighing,
"Greatest, forgive! "
(HAMLET› AT THE BOSTON THEATRE
(EDWIN BOOTH)
VE SIT before the row of evening lamps,
Each in his chair,
W®
Forgetful of November dusks and damps,
And wintry air.
A little gulf of music intervenes,
A bridge of sighs,
Where still the cunning of the curtain screens
Art's paradise.
My thought transcends those viols' shrill delight,
The booming bass,
And towards the regions we shall view to-night
Makes hurried pace.
The painted castle, and the unneeded guard
That ready stand;
The harmless Ghost, that walks with helm unbarred
And beckoning hand;
And, beautiful as dreams of maidenhood,
That doubt defy,
Young Hamlet, with his forehead grief-subdued,
And visioning eye.
XIII-479
O fair dead world, that from thy grave awak'st
A little while,
And in our heart strange revolution mak'st
With thy brief smile!
O beauties vanished, fair lips magical,
Heroic braves!
## p. 7650 (#460) ###########################################
7650
JULIA WARD HOWE
O mighty hearts, that held the world in thrall!
Come from your graves!
The Poet sees you through a mist of tears,-
Such depths divide
Him, with the love and passion of his years,
From you, inside!
The Poet's heart attends your buskined feet,
Your lofty strains,
Till earth's rude touch dissolves that madness sweet,
And life remains:
Life that is something while the senses heed
The spirit's call,
Life that is nothing when our grosser need
Engulfs it all.
And thou, young hero of this mimic scene,
In whose high breast
A genius greater than thy life hath been
Strangely comprest!
Wear'st thou those glories draped about thy soul
Thou dost present?
And art thou by their feeling and control
Thus eloquent?
'Tis with no feignèd power thou bind'st our sense,
No shallow art:
Sure lavish Nature gave thee heritance
Of Hamlet's heart!
Thou dost control our fancies with a might
So wild, so fond,
We quarrel, passed thy circle of delight,
With things beyond;
Returning to the pillows rough with care,
And vulgar food,
Sad from the breath of that diviner air,
That loftier mood.
And there we leave thee, in thy misty tent
Watching alone;
While foes about thee gather imminent,
To us scarce known.
## p. 7651 (#461) ###########################################
JULIA WARD HOWE
7651
Oh, when the lights are quenched, the music hushed,
The plaudits still,
Heaven keep the fountain whence the fair stream gushed
From choking ill!
Let Shakespeare's soul, that wins the world from wrong,
For thee avail,
And not one holy maxim of his song
Before thee fail!
So get thee to thy couch as unreproved
As heroes blest;
And all good angels trusted in and loved
Attend thy rest!
Ο
A NEW SCUI OR
NCE to my Fancy's hall a stranger came,
Of mien unwonted,
And its pale shapes of glory without shame
Or speech confronted.
Fair was my hall,- a gallery of Gods
Smoothly appointed;
With Nymphs and Satyrs from the dewy sods
Freshly anointed.
Great Jove sat throned in state, with Hermes near,
And fiery Bacchus;
Pallas and Pluto, and those powers of Fear
Whose visions rack us.
Artemis wore her crescent free of stars,
The hunt just scented;
Glad Aphrodite met the warrior Mars,
The myriad-tented.
Rude was my visitant, of sturdy form,
Draped in such clothing
As the world's great, whom luxury makes warm,
Look on with loathing.
And yet, methought, his service-badge of soil
With honor wearing;
And in his dexter hand, embossed with toil,
A hammer bearing.
## p. 7652 (#462) ###########################################
7652
JULIA WARD HOWE
But while I waited till his eye should sink,
O'ercome of beauty,
With heart-impatience brimming to the brink
Of courteous duty,-
He smote my marbles many a murderous blow,
His weapon poising;
I, in my wrath and wonderment of woe,
No comment voicing.
"Come, sweep this rubbish from the workman's way,
Wreck of past ages;
Afford me here a lump of harmless clay,
Ye grooms and pages! "
Then from that voidness of our mother Earth
A frame he builded
Of a new feature, - with the power of birth
Fashioned and welded.
It had a might mine eyes had never seen,
A mien, a stature
As if the centuries that rolled between
Had greatened Nature.
It breathed, it moved; above Jove's classic sway
A place was won it:
The rustic sculptor motioned; then, "To-day »
He wrote upon it.
"What man art thou? " I cried, "and what this wrong
That thou hast wrought me?
My marbles lived on symmetry and song;
Why hast thou brought me
"A form of all necessities, that asks
Nurture and feeding?
Not this the burthen of my maidhood's tasks,
Nor my high breeding. "
"Behold," he said, "Life's great impersonate,
Nourished by Labor!
Thy gods are gone with old-time Faith and Fate;
Here is thy Neighbor. "
## p. 7652 (#463) ###########################################
## p. 7652 (#464) ###########################################
J
W. D. HOWELLS.
## p. 7652 (#465) ###########################################
1128
11,"
## p. 7652 (#466) ###########################################
WD HOWELLS.
## p. 7653 (#467) ###########################################
7653
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
(1837-)
OR the last twenty years William Dean Howells has occupied
a unique position among American men of letters.
It can
hardly be said that he is the leader of a school of fiction;
he is rather the exponent in this country of a school whose leaders
are the modern Russian novelists, and in which Tolstoy is the high-
est authority. The realism of 'Anna Karénina' is also the realism
of Silas Lapham. ' Both works- the one a tragedy, the other a seri-
ous comedy-are steeped in the atmosphere of fact; an atmosphere
in which there are no mists of idealism and no elusive distances.
Howells perceived early the rich field which American life offers to
the writer of realistic fiction. The American people are yet too young
for mellowed romance; they are still in the literal period of youth.
The painter of Silas Lapham and of Lemuel Barker embodies this
frank noonday spirit of average life in his novels; only in his essays
and poems does he allow himself occasional truancies from the school
of the actual. He was himself peculiarly fitted by birth, education,
and training, to obtain a firm hold upon the unromantic, humorous,
pathetic life of the every-day American man and woman; to under-
stand its gaucheries, its brave nonchalance, its splendid attempts and
prophetic failures. William Dean Howells is an American of Ameri-
cans. He was born in Ohio in 1837, of a family founded originally
by Welsh Quakers, but closely resembling the families of Transcend-
ental New England in its habits of religious and philosophical
thought; in its simplicity of living; in its simple and democratic
tastes. During the boyhood of the author, his father owned and pub-
lished daily papers in Hamilton and in Dayton, Ohio, successively.
The son learned the printer's trade, and gradually the whole business
of conducting a newspaper. In his latest published work, 'Impres-
sions and Experiences,' he has embodied his recollections of this
apprenticeship in an essay of great charm. At the age of nineteen
he became the Columbus correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette.
At twenty-two he was appointed news editor of the State Journal at
Columbus. About this time he published a volume of verse.
Although Howells is a realist in his literary methods, there have
always been imaginative elements in his prose work; and from the
day when as a young man he published a slim volume of lyrics with
## p. 7654 (#468) ###########################################
7654
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
his friend Piatt, he has been a poet. The early verse was graceful,
musical, distinctive; the later, deeper work, gathered into the striking
volume 'Stops of Various Quills' (1895), shows Howells's intense inter-
est in the great modern social problems, and his yearning brotherli-
ness. The brooding minor note is constant in these haunting poems,
which are rich in suggestion, full of noble thought and feeling, and
in their simple, almost bald diction, at times both touching and
beautiful.
His consulship at Venice, 1861-65, prepared him by its liberalizing
influences for the more cosmopolitan demands of the essay and the
novel. His impressions of his sojourn were embodied in 'Venetian
Life,' a book which revealed the qualities of his literary talent: his
powers of minute and kindly observation; his sense of the pictur-
esque; his close adhesion to delicate particulars, to expressive details,
to significant facts.
His subsequent residence in New York City, as a writer for the
Tribune and the Nation, paved the way still further for his fiction
writing. It was not until 1871, when he had become the assistant
editor of the Atlantic Monthly, that he ventured into this field. His
first novel, Their Wedding Journey,' was instantly recognized as
something more than a well-told story. It was a transcript of two
very human lives. Its spirit of actuality was new in American fiction.
Its homeliness, its pleasantry, its every-day character, at once secured
its popularity. It was followed by a long succession of well-written
novels. If he had had no other claims upon the allegiance of those
anxious to establish high literary standards in this country, Howells
would still deserve the approval of the most critical lovers of litera-
ture for his delicate and conscientious workmanship. He has set a
much-needed example of carefulness and thoughtfulness in style and
construction. He has the conscience, the instinct, and the taste of an
artist. Though a deliberate, he has however been a prolific writer.
Almost every year since 1871 has brought forth a novel. 'A Chance
Acquaintance' appeared in 1873; A Foregone Conclusion' in 1874:
'Out of the Question' in 1876, and 'A Counterfeit Presentment' in
1877,- both cast in drama form; The Lady of the Aroostook' in
1878; The Undiscovered Country' in 1880; 'A Fearful Responsibil-
ity in 1882; 'Dr. Breen's Practice' in 1883; A Modern Instance' in
1883; A Woman's Reason' in 1884; Three Villages' in 1885; and
later The Rise of Silas Lapham,' 'Annie Kilburn,' 'April Hopes,'
'A Hazard of New Fortunes,' The Shadow of a Dream,' and numer-
ous farces which have appeared from time to time in various maga-
zines. The Rise of Silas Lapham' is a finely representative novel
of what may be called the middle period of Howells's development.
It is a triumph of realism; it is thoroughly and broadly American in
## p. 7655 (#469) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7655
tone; it is instinct with kindly human sympathy. The novelist has
a true comprehension of the "common people," especially of the
common people as they are found in these United States: fixed mem-
bers of no class, endowed with many virtues, destitute of traditions,—
the First Man or the First Woman, for all practical purposes, in a
new world; God-fearing, money-making persons, acknowledging no
superiors in theory, but always awed by their "betters» in fact.
These types appear and reappear in Howells's stories; he is the Dick-
ens of the self-made man. Silas Lapham is born a poor boy, of hon-
est parents, without educational or social opportunities. He makes his
money in mineral paint. His daughters are
His daughters are as much in advance of
him and his crude successes as the second generation of the newly
rich usually is in this country. By a series of accidents this family
of American types is thrown with gentlefolk of Boston. The usual
little tragedies and comedies ensue. The story is told with consum-
mate skill. Its objectivity is heightened by the author's fidelity to the
facts of the case. Its humor is unmistakable.
Moreover, it is writ-
ten with that marvelous clearness of diction, that easy command of
current idiom, which constitute Howells's strongest claim to a great
style. The author says what he means in unmistakable language.
He never sacrifices lucidity to effect. He never indulges in mere
word-painting. His essays are as satisfactory as his novels in this
respect.
Mr. Howells's latest phase, that in which he shows a deep desire
to understand and set forth the strenuous American social problems,
-the meaning of socialism, the relations of labor and capital, and,
more broadly, the mystery of poverty and of human suffering,—is
typified in a book like 'A Hazard of New Fortunes. It is American
in its scenes and characters, and all through it is a sense of the dra-
matic unrest of current conditions in a great city like New York,—
the stormy and pathetic episode quoted being the culmination of
causes which attract the most earnest thought of Howells, an ideal
statement thereof coming out in such a volume as the suggestive 'A
Traveler from Altruria. '
The absence of idealism in Howells's writings has been cited as
their gravest defect; but it is by no means true that he excludes the
ideal sides of life from treatment. In the main, however, it is enough
for him to present the lives of men without comment, after nature's
own fashion. The American world of letters owes him a lasting debt
of gratitude in that he has made his presentation with fidelity to a
high ideal of artistic excellence. Since the year 1881, when he re-
signed the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, he has lived first in
Boston and later in New York, devoting himself to the writing of
novels, essays, and miscellaneous sketches. In these novels and in
¡
## p. 7656 (#470) ###########################################
7656
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
his occasional essays his hand preserves its cunning, and his writing
always has that indefinable charm which is the enduring note in
good literature. And to the charm is added the broad outlook and
the deep ethical interest which are typical of the man in the ripe
maturity of his powers.
THE BEWILDERED GUEST
From Stops of Various Quills. Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
WAS not asked if I should like to come.
I
I have not seen my host here since I came,
Or had a word of welcome in his name.
Some say that we shall never see him, and some
That we shall see him elsewhere, and then know
Why we were bid. How long I am to stay
I have not the least notion. None, they say,
Was ever told when he should come or go.
But every now and then there bursts upon
The song and mirth a lamentable noise,
A sound of shrieks and sobs, that strikes our joys
Dumb in our breasts; and then, some one is gone.
They say we meet him. None knows where or when.
We know we shall not meet him here again.
WR
HOPE
From Stops of Various Quills. Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
E SAILED and sailed upon the desert sea
Where for whole days we alone seemed to be.
At last we saw a dim, vague line arise
Between the empty billows and the skies,
That grew and grew until it wore the shape
Of cove and inlet, promontory and cape;
Then hills and valleys, rivers, fields, and woods,
Steeples and roofs, and village neighborhoods.
And then I thought, "Sometime I shall embark
Upon a sea more desert and more dark
Than ever this was, and between the skies
And empty billows I shall see arise
Another world out of that waste and lapse,
Like yonder land. Perhaps - perhaps - perhaps! "
## p. 7657 (#471) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7657
SOCIETY
Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
From Stops of Various Quills.
I
LOOKED, and saw a splendid pageantry
Of beautiful women and of lordly men,
Taking their pleasure in a flowery plain,
Where poppies and the red anemone,
And many another leaf of cramoisy,
Flickered about their feet, and gave their stain
To heels of iron or satin, and the grain
Of silken garments floating far and free,
As in the dance they wove themselves, or strayed
By twos together, or lightly smiled and bowed,
Or curtsied to each other, or else played
At games of mirth and pastime, unafraid
In their delight; and all so high and proud
They seemed scarce of the earth whereon they trod.
I looked again, and saw that flowery space
Stirring, as if alive, beneath the tread
That rested now upon an old man's head,
And now upon a baby's gasping face,
Or mother's bosom, or the rounded grace
Of a girl's throat; and what had seemed the red
Of flowers was blood, in gouts and gushes shed
From hearts that broke under that frolic pace.
And now and then from out the dreadful floor
An arm or brow was lifted from the rest,
As if to strike in madness, or implore
For mercy; and anon some suffering breast
Heaved from the mass and sank; and as before
The revelers above them thronged and prest.
ANOTHER DAY
From Stops of Various Quills. Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
A
NOTHER day, and with it that brute joy,
Or that prophetic rapture of the boy
Whom every morning brings as glad a breath
As if it dawned upon the end of death!
All other days have run the common course,
And left me at their going neither worse
## p. 7658 (#472) ###########################################
7658
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Nor better for them; only a little older,
A little sadder, and a little colder.
But this it seems as if this day might be
The day I somehow always thought to see,
And that should come to bless me past the scope
And measure of my farthest-reaching hope.
―――
To-day, maybe, the things that were concealed
Before the first day was, shall be revealed;
The riddle of our misery shall be read,
And it be clear whether the dead are dead.
Before this sun shall sink into the west
The tired earth may have fallen on his breast,
And into heaven the world have passed away.
At any rate, it is another day!
A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM
From Their Wedding Journey. Copyright 1871 and 1894, by W. D. Howells.
Reprinted by permission of the author, and of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. ,
publishers.
TH
HEY had waited to see Leonard, in order that they might
learn better how to find his house in the country; and now,
when they came in upon him at nine o'clock, he welcomed
them with all his friendly heart. He rose from the pile of morn-
ing's letters to which he had but just sat down; he placed them
the easiest chairs; he made a feint of its not being a busy hour
with him, and would have had them look upon his office, which
was still damp and odorous from the porter's broom, as a kind of
down-town parlor: but after they had briefly accounted to his
amazement for their appearance then and there, and Isabel had
boasted of the original fashion in which they had that morning
seen New York, they took pity on him and bade him adieu till
evening.
They crossed from Broadway to the noisome street by the
ferry, and in a little while had taken their places in the train on
the thither side of the water.
"Don't tell me, Basil," said Isabel, "that Leonard travels fifty
miles every day by rail going to and from his work! "
"I must, dearest, if I would be truthful. "
## p. 7659 (#473) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7659
«< Then, darling, there are worse things in this world than
living up at the South End, aren't there? " And in agreement
upon Boston as a place of the greatest natural advantages, as
well as all acquirable merits, with after-talk that need not be
recorded, they arrived in the best humor at the little country
station near which the Leonards dwelt.
I must inevitably follow Mrs. Isabel thither, though I do it
at the cost of the reader, who suspects the excitements which a
long description of the movement would delay. The ladies were
very old friends, and they had not met since Isabel's return from
Europe and renewal of her engagement. Upon the news of this,
Mrs. Leonard had swallowed with surprising ease all that she
had said in blame of Basil's conduct during the rupture, and
exacted a promise from her friend that she should pay her the
first visit after their marriage. And now that they had come
together, their only talk was of husbands, whom they viewed in
every light to which husbands could be turned, and still found
an inexhaustible novelty in the theme. Mrs. Leonard beheld in
her friend's joy the sweet reflection of her own honeymoon, and
Isabel was pleased to look upon the prosperous marriage of the
former as the image of her future. Thus, with immense profit
and comfort, they reassured one another by every question and
answer, and in their weak content lapsed far behind the repre-
sentative women of our age, when husbands are at best a neces-
sary evil, and the relation of wives to them is known to be one
of pitiable subjection. When these two pretty fogies put their
heads of false hair together, they were as silly and benighted as
their great-grandmothers could have been in the same circum-
stances, and as I say, shamefully encouraged each other in their
absurdity. The absurdity appeared too good and blessed to be
true. "Do you really suppose, Basil," Isabel would say to her
oppressor, after having given him some elegant extract from the
last conversation upon husbands, "that we shall get on as smoothly
as the Leonards when we have been married ten years? Lucy
says that things go more hitchily the first year than ever they
do afterwards, and that people love each other better and better,
just because they've got used to it. Well, our bliss does seem a
little crude and garish compared with their happiness; and yet"
-she put up both her palms against his, and gave a vehement
little push"there is something agreeable about it, even at this
stage of the proceedings. "
## p. 7660 (#474) ###########################################
7660
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
"Isabel," said her husband with severity, "this is bridal! ”
"No matter! I only want to seem an old married woman to
the general public. But the application of it is that you must be
careful not to contradict me, or cross me in anything, so that we
can be like the Leonards very much sooner than they became so.
The great object is not to have any hitchiness; and you know
you are provoking—at times. "
They both educated themselves for continued and tranquil
happiness by the example and precept of their friends; and the
time passed swiftly in the pleasant learning, and in the novelty
of the life led by the Leonards. This indeed merits a closer
study than can be given here, for it is the life led by vast num-
bers of prosperous New-Yorkers who love both the excitement of
the city and the repose of the country, and who aspire to unite
the enjoyment of both in their daily existence. The suburbs of
the metropolis stretch landward fifty miles in every direction; and
everywhere are handsome villas like Leonard's, inhabited by men
like himself, whom strict study of the time-table enables to spend
all their working hours in the city and all their smoking and
sleeping hours in the country.
The home and the neighborhood of the Leonards put on their
best looks for our bridal pair, and they were charmed. They all
enjoyed the visit, said guests and hosts, they were all sorry to
have it come to an end; yet they all resigned themselves to this
conclusion. Practically, it had no other result than to detain the
travelers into the very heart of the hot weather. In that weather
it was easy to do anything that did not require an active effort,
and resignation was so natural with the mercury at ninety, that
I am not sure but there was something sinful in it.
They had given up their cherished purpose of going to Albany
by the day boat, which was represented to them in every impos
sible phase. It would be dreadfully crowded, and whenever it
stopped the heat would be insupportable. Besides, it would bring
them to Albany at an hour when they must either spend the
night there, or push on to Niagara by the night train. "You
had better go by the evening boat. It will be light almost till
you reach West Point, and you'll see all the best scenery. Then
you can get a good night's rest, and start fresh in the morning. "
So they were counseled, and they assented, as they would have
done if they had been advised: "You had better go by the
morning boat. It's deliciously cool, traveling; you see the whole
## p. 7661 (#475) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7661
of the river; you reach Albany for supper, and you push through
to Niagara that night and are done with it. "
They took leave of Leonard at breakfast and of his wife at
noon, and fifteen minutes later they were rushing from the heat
of the country into the heat of the city, where some affairs and
pleasures were to employ them till the evening boat should start.
Their spirits were low, for the terrible spell of the great heat
brooded upon them. All abroad burned the fierce white light of
the sun, in which not only the earth seemed to parch and thirst,
but the very air withered, and was faint and thin to the troubled
respiration. Their train was full of people who had come long
journeys from broiling cities of the West, and who were dusty
and ashen and reeking in the slumbers at which some of them
still vainly caught. On every one lay an awful languor. Here
and there stirred a fan, like the broken wing of a dying bird;
now and then a sweltering young mother shifted her hot baby
from one arm to another; after every station the desperate con-
ductor swung through the long aisle and punched the ticket,
which each passenger seemed to yield him with a tacit maledic-
tion; a suffering child hung about the empty tank, which could
only gasp out a cindery drop or two of ice-water. The wind
buffeted faintly at the windows; when the door was opened, the
clatter of rails struck through and through the car like a de-
moniac yell.
Yet when they arrived at the station by the ferry-side, they
seemed to have entered its stifling darkness from fresh and vig-
orous atmosphere, so close and dead and mixed with the carbonic
breath of the locomotives was the air of the place. The thin old
wooden walls that shut out the glare of the sun transmitted an
intensified warmth; the roof seemed to hover lower and lower,
and in its coal-smoked, raftery hollow to generate a heat deadlier
than that poured upon it from the skies.
In a convenient place in the station hung a thermometer,
before which every passenger, on going aboard the ferry-boat,
paused as at a shrine, and mutely paid his devotions. At the
altar of this fetich our friends also paused, and saw that the
mercury was above ninety; and, exulting with the pride that sav
ages take in the cruel might of their idols, bowed their souls to
the great god Heat.
On the boat they found a place where the breath of the
sea struck cool across their faces, and made them forget the
## p. 7662 (#476) ###########################################
7662
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
thermometer for the brief time of the transit. But presently
they drew near that strange irregular row of wooden buildings
and jutting piers which skirts the river on the New York side;
and before the boat's motion ceased the air grew thick and warm
again, and tainted with the foulness of the street on which the
buildings front. Upon this the boat's passengers issued, passing
up through the gangway, on one side of which a throng of
return passengers was pent by a gate of iron bars, like a herd
of wild animals. They were streaming with perspiration, and
according to their different temperaments had faces of deep crim-
son or deadly pallor.
"Now the question is, my dear," said Basil, when free of the
press they lingered for a moment in the shade outside, "whether
we had better walk up to Broadway, at an immediate sacrifice of
fibre, and get a stage there, or take one of these cars here and
be landed a little nearer, with half the exertion. By this route
we shall have sights and smells which the other can't offer us,
but whichever we take we shall be sorry. "
"Then I say take this," decided Isabel. "I want to be sorry
upon the easiest possible terms, this weather. "
They hailed the first car that passed, and got into it. Well
for them both if she could have exercised this philosophy with
regard to the whole day's business, or if she could have given
up her plans for it with the same resignation she had practiced
in regard to the day boat! It seems to me a proof of the small
advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so
hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do. It matters
very little whether the affair is one of enjoyment or of business,
we feel the same bitter need of pursuing it to the end. The
mere fact of intention gives it a flavor of duty; and dutiolatry, as
one may call the devotion, has passed so deeply into our life that
we have scarcely a sense any more of the sweetness of even a
neglected pleasure. We will not taste the fine, guilty rapture
of a deliberate dereliction; the gentle sin of omission is all but
blotted from the calendar of our crimes. If I had been Colum-
bus, I should have thought twice before setting sail, when I was
quite ready to do so; and as for Plymouth Rock, I should have
sternly resisted the blandishments of those twin sirens, Starvation
and Cold, who beckoned the Puritans shoreward, and as soon as
ever I came into sight of their granite perch should have turned
back to England. But it is now too late to repair these errors;
## p. 7663 (#477) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7663
and so, on one of the hottest days of last year, behold my obdu-
rate bridal pair, in a Tenth or Twentieth Avenue horse-car, setting
forth upon the fulfillment of a series of intentions, any of which
had wiselier been left unaccomplished.
Isabel had said they
would call upon certain people in Fiftieth Street, and then shop
slowly down, ice-creaming and staging and variously cooling and
calming by the way, until they reached the ticket office on
Broadway, whence they could indefinitely betake themselves to
the steamboat an hour or two before her departure. She felt
that they had yielded sufficiently to circumstances and conditions.
already on this journey, and she was resolved that the present
half-day in New York should be the half-day of her original
design.
It was not the most advisable thing, as I have allowed; but it
was inevitable, and it afforded them a spectacle which is by no
means wanting in sublimity, and which is certainly unique,— the
spectacle of that great city on a hot day, defiant of the elements.
and prospering on, with every form of labor and at a terrible
cost of life. The man carrying the hod to the top of the walls,
that rankly grow and grow as from his life's blood, will only lay
down his load when he feels the mortal glare of the sun blaze
in upon heart and brain; the plethoric millionaire for whom he
toils will plot and plan in his office till he swoons at the desk;
the trembling beast must stagger forward while the flame-faced
tormentor on the box has strength to lash him on: in all those
vast palaces of commerce there are ceaseless sale and purchase,
packing and unpacking, lifting up and laying down, arriving and
departing loads; in thousands of shops is the unspared and
unsparing weariness of selling; in the street, filled by the hurry
and suffering of tens of thousands, is the weariness of buying.
Their afternoon's experience was something that Basil and
Isabel could, when it was past, look upon only as a kind of vis-
ion, magnificent at times, and at other times full of indignity and
pain. They seemed to have dreamed of a long horse-car pilgrim-
age through that squalid street by the river-side; where presently
they came to a market, opening upon the view hideous vistas of
carnage, and then into a wide avenue, with processions of cars
like their own coming and going up and down the centre of a
foolish and useless breadth, which made even the tall buildings
(rising gauntly up among the older houses of one or two stories)
on either hand look low, and let in the sun to bake the dust
## p. 7664 (#478) ###########################################
7664
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
that the hot breaths of wind caught up and sent swirling into
the shabby shops. Here they dreamed of the eternal demolition
and construction of the city, and farther on of vacant lots full of
granite bowlders, clambered over by goats. In their dream they
had fellow-passengers, whose sufferings made them odious, and
whom they were glad to leave behind when they alighted from
the car, and running out of the blaze of the avenue quenched
themselves in the shade of the cross street. A little strip of
shadow lay along the row of brown-stone fronts, but there were
intervals where the vacant lots cast no shadow.
With great
bestowal of thought they studied hopelessly how to avoid these
spaces, as if they had been difficult torrents or vast expanses
of desert sand; they crept slowly along till they came to such a
place, and dashed swiftly across it, and then, fainter than before,
moved on.
They seemed now and then to stand at doors, and to
be told that people were out, and again that they were in; and
they had a sense of cool dark parlors, and the airy rustling of
light-muslined ladies, of chat and of fans and ice-water, and then
they came forth again; and evermore
"The day increased from heat to heat. "
At last they were aware of an end of their visits, and of a
purpose to go down-town again, and of seeking the nearest car
by endless blocks of brown-stone fronts, which with their eter-
nal brown-stone flights of steps, and their handsome, intolerable
uniformity, oppressed them like a procession of houses trying
to pass a given point and never getting by. Upon these streets
there was seldom a soul to be seen; so that when their ringing
at a door had evoked answer, it had startled them with vague,
sad surprise. In the distance on either hand they could see cars
and carts and wagons toiling up and down the avenues, and on
the next intersecting pavement sometimes a laborer with his
jacket slung across his shoulder, or a dog that had plainly made
up his mind to go mad. Up to the time of their getting into
one of those phantasmal cars for the return down-townwards they
had kept up a show of talk in their wretched dream. They had
spoken of other hot days that they had known elsewhere; and
they had wondered that the tragical character of heat had been
so little recognized. They said that the daily New York murder
might even at that moment be somewhere taking place, and that
no murder of the whole homicidal year could have such proper
## p. 7665 (#479) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7665
circumstance; they morbidly wondered what that day's murder
would be, and in what swarming tenement-house, or den of the
assassin streets by the river-sides,- if indeed it did not befall in
some such high, close-shuttered, handsome dwelling as those they
passed, in whose twilight it would be so easy to strike down the
master, and leave him undiscovered and unmourned by the fam-
ily ignorantly absent at the mountains or the seaside. They
conjectured of the horror of midsummer battles, and pictured the
anguish of shipwrecked men upon a tropical coast, and the grimy
misery of stevedores unloading shiny cargoes of anthracite coal
at city docks. But now at last, as they took seats opposite one
another in the crowded car, they seemed to have drifted infinite
distances and long epochs asunder. They looked hopelessly across
the intervening gulf, and mutely questioned when it was and
from what far city they or some remote ancestors of theirs had
set forth upon a wedding journey. They bade each other a tacit
farewell, and with patient, pathetic faces awaited the end of the
world.
When they alighted, they took their way up through one of
the streets of the great wholesale businesses, to Broadway. On
this street was a throng of trucks and wagons lading and unlad-
ing; bales and boxes rose and sank by pulleys overhead; the
footway was a labyrinth of packages of every shape and size:
there was no flagging of the pitiless energy that moved all
forward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on it, save in the
reeking faces of its helpless instruments. But when the wedding-
journeyers emerged upon Broadway, the other passages and inci-
dents of their dream faded before the superior fantasticality of
the spectacle. It was four o'clock, the deadliest hour of the
deadly summer day. The spiritless air seemed to have a quality
of blackness in it, as if filled with the gloom of low-hovering
wings. One half the street lay in shadow, and one half in sun;
but the sunshine itself was dim, as if a heat greater than its own
had smitten it with languor. Little gusts of sick, warm wind
blew across the great avenue at the corners of the intersecting
streets. In the upward distance, at which the journeyers looked,
the loftier roofs and steeples lifted themselves dim out of the
livid atmosphere, and far up and down the length of the street
swept a stream of tormented life. All sorts of wheeled things
thronged it, conspicuous among which rolled and jarred the gaud-
ily painted stages, with quivering horses driven each by a man
XIII-480
## p. 7666 (#480) ###########################################
7666
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
It
who sat in the shade of a branching white umbrella, and suffered
with a moody truculence of aspect, and as if he harbored the bit-
terness of death in his heart for the crowding passengers within,
when one of them pulled the strap about his legs and sum-
moned him to halt. Most of the foot passengers kept to the
shady side; and to the unaccustomed eyes of the strangers they
were not less in number than at any other time, though there
were fewer women among them. Indomitably resolute of soul,
they held their course with the swift pace of custom, and only
here and there they showed the effect of the heat.
One man,
collarless, with waistcoat unbuttoned and hat set far back from
his forehead, waved a fan before his death-white flabby face, and
set down one foot after the other with the heaviness of a som-
nambulist. Another, as they passed him, was saying huskily to
the friend at his side, "I can't stand this much longer. My
hands tingle as if they had gone to sleep; my heart—" But
still the multitude hurried on, passing, repassing, encountering,
evading, vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dis-
persing down the side streets and swarming out of them.
was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination,
and in its effect of universal lunacy it might well have seemed
the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who
were in it but not of it, as they fancied,- though there was no
reason for this,-looked on it amazed; and at last, their own
errands being accomplished, and themselves so far cured of the
madness of purpose, they cried with one voice that it was a hid-
eous sight, and strove to take refuge from it in the nearest place
where the soda fountain sparkled. It was a vain desire. At the
front door of the apothecary's hung a thermometer, and as they
entered they heard the next comer cry out, with a maniacal pride
in the affliction laid upon mankind, "Ninety-seven degrees! "
Behind them at the door there poured in a ceaseless stream of
people, each pausing at the shrine of heat before he tossed off
the hissing draught that two pale, close-clipped boys served them
from either side of the fountain. Then in the order of their
coming they issued through another door upon the side street;
each, as he disappeared, turning his face half round, and casting
a casual glance upon a little group near another counter. The
group was of a very patient, half frightened, half puzzled looking
gentleman who sat perfectly still on a stool, and of a lady who
stood beside him, rubbing all over his head a handkerchief full
## p. 7667 (#481) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7667
of pounded ice, and easing one hand with the other when the
first became tired. Basil drank his soda and paused to look
upon this group, which he felt would commend itself to realistic
sculpture as eminently characteristic of the local life, and as "The
Sunstroke" would sell enormously in the hot season.
« Better
take a little more of that," the apothecary said, looking up from
his prescription, and at the organized sympathy of the seemingly
indifferent crowd smiling very kindly at his patient, who there-
upon tasted something in the glass he held. "Do you still feel
like fainting? " asked the humane authority. "Slightly, now and
then," answered the other; "but I'm hanging on hard to the
bottom curve of that icicled S on your soda fountain, and I feel
that I'm all right as long as I can see that. The people get
rather hazy occasionally, and have no features to speak of. But
I don't know that I look very impressive myself," he added, in
the jesting mood which seems the natural condition of Ameri-
cans in the face of all embarrassments.
"Oh, you'll do! " the apothecary answered with a laugh; but
he said, in answer to an anxious question from the lady, "He
mustn't be moved for an hour yet," and gayly pestled away at a
prescription, while she resumed her office of grinding the pounded
ice round and round upon her husband's skull. Isabel offered
her the commiseration of friendly words, and of looks kinder yet;
and then, seeing that they could do nothing, she and Basil fell
into the endless procession, and passed out of the side door.
"What a shocking thing! " she whispered. "Did you see how
all the people looked, one after another, so indifferently at that
couple, and evidently forgot them the next instant?
It was
dreadful. I shouldn't like to have you sunstruck in New York. ”
"That's very considerate of you; but place for place, if any
accident must happen to me among strangers, I think I should
prefer to have it in New York. The biggest place is always the
kindest as well as the cruelest place. Amongst the thousands of
spectators the good Samaritan as well as the Levite would be
sure to be. As for a sunstroke, it requires peculiar gifts. But
if you compel me to a choice in the matter, then I say, give
me the busiest part of Broadway for a sunstroke. There is such
experience of calamity there that you could hardly fall the first
victim to any misfortune. Probably the gentleman at the apothe-
cary's was merely exhausted by the heat, and ran in there for
revival. The apothecary has a case of the kind on his hands
## p. 7668 (#482) ###########################################
7668
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
every blazing afternoon, and knows just what to do. The crowd
may be a little ennuyé of sunstrokes, and to that degree indif-
ferent; but they most likely know that they can only do harm by
an expression of sympathy, and so they delegate their pity as
they have delegated their helpfulness, to the proper authority, and
go about their business. If a man was overcome in the middle
of a village street, the blundering country druggist wouldn't know
what to do, and the tender-hearted people would crowd about so
that no breath of air could reach the victim. "
"Maybe so, dear," said the wife pensively; "but if anything
did happen to you in New York, I should like to have the spec-
tators look as if they saw a human being in trouble. Perhaps
I'm a little exacting. "
"I think you are.
Nothing is so hard as to understand that
there are human beings in this world besides one's self and
one's set. But let us be selfishly thankful that it isn't you and
I there in the apothecary's shop, as it might very well be; and
let us get to the boat as soon as we can, and end this horrible
midsummer-day's dream.
for criticism by Elizabeth Barrett opened
the way to a cordial friendship and a cor-
respondence of seven years. These delight-
ful letters were published in 1877. Mrs.
Browning contributed to Horne's 'Poems of
Geoffrey Chaucer Modernized,' and wrote
several essays for his 'Spirit of the Age,'
a collection of criticisms published in 1844.
In 1852 Horne removed to Australia, and remained there until
1866; his book 'Australian Facts and Principles' was one outcome
of this residence. Again returning to England, he continued literary
work until his death at Margate, March 13th, 1884. His last works
were tragedies, including 'Judas Iscariot: A Miracle-Play,' and a
curious prose tract, Sithron the Star-Stricken' (1883), which he pre-
tended to take from the Arabian.
"
R. H. H. HORNE
Poe said that his 'Orion' might be called " a homily against
supineness and apathy in the cause of human progress, and in favor
of energetic action for the good of the race.
It is our delib-
erate opinion," he affirmed, "that in all that regards the loftiest and
holiest attributes of true poetry, 'Orion' has never been excelled. "
## p. 7642 (#452) ###########################################
7642
RICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE
The narrative is drawn from a number of Greek and Roman fables.
It describes the giant hunter Orion, who is loved by Artemis (Diana),
Merope, and Eos (Aurora). The jealous Artemis pierces him with her
arrows; but Zeus, in answer to the prayers of Eos, places him among
the constellations, where he may enjoy her affection forever.
MORNING
From Orion'
L
EVEL with the summit of that eastern mount
By slow approach, and like a promontory
Which seems to glide and meet a coming ship,
The pale-gold platform of the morning came
Towards the gliding mount. Against a sky
Of delicate purple, snow-bright courts and halls
Touched with light silvery green, gleaming across,
Fronted by pillars vast, cloud-capitaled,
With shafts of changeful pearl, all reared upon
An isle of clear aerial gold, came floating;
And in the centre, clad in fleecy white,
With lucid lilies in her golden hair,
Eos, sweet Goddess of the Morning, stood.
From the bright peak of that surrounded mount,
One step sufficed to gain the tremulous floor
Whereon the Palace of the Morning shone,
Scarcely a bow-shot distant; but that step
Orion's humbled and still mortal feet
Dared not adventure. In the Goddess's face
Imploringly he gazed. "Advance! " she said,
In tones more sweet than when some heavenly bird,
Hid in a rosy cloud, its morning hymn
Warbles unseen, wet with delicious dews,
And to earth's flowers all looking up in prayer,
"Believe-advance! —
Tells of the coming bliss.
Or, as the spheres move onward with their song
That calls me to awaken other lands,
That moment will escape which ne'er returns! »
Forward Orion stepped: the platform bright
Shook like the reflex of a star in water
Moved by the breeze, throughout its whole expanse;
And even the palace glistened fitfully,
As with electric shiver it sent forth
Odors of flowers divine and all fresh life.
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RICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE
7643
Still stood he where he stepped, nor to return
Attempted. To essay one pace beyond
He felt no power; yet onward he advanced
Safe to the Goddess, who, with hand outstretched,
Into the palace led him. Grace and strength,
With sense of happy change to finer earth,
Freshness of nature and belief in good,
Came flowing o'er his soul, and he was blest.
'Tis always morning somewhere in the world,
And Eos rises, circling constantly
The varied regions of mankind. No pause
Of renovation and of freshening rays
She knows; but evermore her love breathes forth
On field and forest, as on human hope,
Health, beauty, power, thought, action, and advance.
All this Orion witnessed, and rejoiced.
The turmoil he had known, the late distress
By loss of passion's object and of sight,
Were now exchanged for these serene delights
Of contemplation, as the influence
That Eos wrought around forever, dawned
Upon his vision and his inmost heart
In sweetness and success. All sympathy
With all fair things that in her circle lay,
She gave, and all received; nor knew of strife:
For from the Sun her cheek its bloom withdrew,
And ere intolerant noon, the floating realm
Of Eos-queen of the awakening earth
Was brightening other lands, wherefrom black Night
Her faded chariot down the sky had driven
Behind the sea. Thus from the earth upraised,
And over its tumultuous breast sustained
In peace and tranquil glory,- oh blest state!
Clear-browed Orion, full of thankfulness
And pure devotion to the goddess, dwelt
Within the glowing Palace of the Morn.
But these serene airs did not therefore bring
A death-sleep o'er the waves of memory,
Where all its clouds and colors, specks of sails,
Its car-borne gods, shipwrecks, and drowning men,
Passed full in view; yet with a mellowing sense
Ideal, and from pain sublimed. Thus came
Mirrors of nature to him, and full oft
Downward on Chios turned his happy eyes,
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7644
RICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE
With grateful thoughts that o'er life's sorrows wove
The present texture of a sweet content,
Passing all wisdom, or its fairest flower.
He saw the woods, and blessed them for the sake
Of Artemis; the city, and rich gloom
That o'er the cedar forest ever hung,
He also blessed for Merope; the isle
And all that dwelt there, he with smiles beheld.
## p. 7645 (#455) ###########################################
7645
JULIA WARD HOWE
(1819? -)
B
Y BIRTH a member of a fashionable New York circle; by edu-
cation a cultivated and accomplished woman of society; by
marriage made one of a group of zealous and uncompromis-
ing philanthropists,-abolitionists, prison reformers, equal-suffragists,
coeducationists, - Mrs. Julia Ward Howe has turned her eclectic train-
ing only to generous uses. She has published verse, travels, and
essays; she has taught - if much serious and eloquent journalistic
work may be reckoned among the higher forms of teaching; she has
won much reputation as a public speaker
on social, educational, and political subjects;
and it is not impossible that even had she
written nothing, her brilliant fame as a con-
versationist, and as the most inspiring of
companions, might insure her that vague
though sure renown which belongs to the
famous French hostesses of the seventeenth
century.
JULIA WARD HOWE
The New York of her youth was still a
neighborly city, where the small set of cul-
tivated and leisurely families saw much not
only of each other, but of the agreeable
foreigners who came to this country. Her
father, Samuel Ward, was a well-known
banker, to whom all notable persons brought letters of introduction,
and in whose household the young people learned to be agreeable, to
be alert, and to adjust their mental vision to an ever-widening hori-
zon. Mrs. Ward, a very cultivated woman, was herself a poet of some
merit, whose poems, never published, were greatly admired in private
circles. The clever second daughter took profit from all her experi-
ences, read everything that came in her way, attacked with energy
Latin and German,- a knowledge of languages being then generally
deemed superfluous if not disastrous in what was known as "female
education," and when still in short dresses wrote reams of verse.
Her wise elders, however, while encouraging her literary tastes, per-
mitted none of this intellectual green fruit to find a market.
She had been a New York belle for two or three seasons when her
marriage with Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, of Boston, placed her in a
## p. 7646 (#456) ###########################################
7646
JULIA WARD HOWE
new world. This eminent philanthropist, then in the prime of middle
age, had devoted his whole life to the unfortunate. When hardly out
of college and medical school he had enlisted as a volunteer in the
cause of Greek Independence in the revolution of 1824,-the contest
to which Lord Byron gave his life; out of untrained material he had
created an excellent surgical corps for the insurgents; at the declara-
tion of peace he had established an industrial colony on the Isthmus
of Corinth; in 1830 he had served as president of a relief committee
in the Polish uprising, and been imprisoned in Prussia for his pains:
he had founded in South Boston the first American institution for the
instruction of the blind; and he was among the most efficient of the
antislavery crusaders. The friends who surrounded him took life and
themselves very seriously, and all sorts of causes came to the Howe
abode to be justified and adopted.
«<
Mrs. Howe's nature responded generously to these new demands.
She became the eager advocate of the oppressed, whether victims of
the law like the slave, of political tyranny like the Irish, the Poles,
or the Hungarians, or of public opinion,-as, to her thinking, were
all women. Her ready pen was always at service of her many
clients. But she found time to study French, Greek, and Italian, and
to devote herself to modern philosophy, working hard at Schelling,
Hegel, Fichte, Spinoza, and Kant. She wrote philosophical lectures.
which she read at her own house, and she helped to establish philo-
sophical clubs. With her husband she edited an able antislavery
paper, the Boston Commonwealth, to which she contributed leaders,
essays, poems, letters, and witty comments. In the ten or twelve
years following 1854 she published three volumes of poems,-'Passion
Flowers,' 'Words for the Hour,' and 'Later Lyrics'; two books of
travel, 'A Trip to Cuba' and 'From the Oak to the Olive'; and a
drama, 'The World's Own'; having written also in the same period
hundreds of clever newspaper letters to the New York Tribune and
the Anti-Slavery Standard. Since 1881 she has published 'Modern
Society,' a 'Life of Margaret Fuller,' and a second volume of essays,
entitled 'Is Polite Society Polite? ' She has chosen to include within
covers only a small part of her writings, nor does even their whole
bulk represent the life work of this versatile and public-spirited
author. She inspired the prosperous New England Women's Club, the
pioneer of its kind in America. She was a delegate to the World's
Prison Reform Congress in London, in 1872, and helped to found the
Women's Peace Association. She was president of the women's
branch of the great New Orleans Exposition in 1884, and she has
presided over innumerable clubs, conventions, and congresses.
Notwithstanding this enormous activity and productiveness, her
own countrymen associate her name almost wholly with one poem,
## p. 7647 (#457) ###########################################
JULIA WARD HOWE
7647
'The Battle Hymn of the Republic'; a poem struck off at white heat
early in the Civil War, when, in the camps about Washington, Mrs.
Howe was thrilled by the marching of thousands of gallant young
soldiers to the martial air of John Brown's Body. ' The regiments
caught up with enthusiasm the new words which she set to the
familiar tune; and the 'Battle Hymn' was sung in camp and field,
from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico. It became the Marseillaise of the
unemotional Yankee.
[All the following poems are taken from 'Later Lyrics,' copyright 1865, and
are reprinted by permission of Lee & Shepard, publishers, Boston. ]
BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC
INE eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
M
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are
stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on. "
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat:
Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on!
OUR ORDERS
´EAVE no more silks, ye Lyons looms,
To deck our girls for gay delights!
The crimson flower of battle blooms,
And solemn marches fill the nights.
WEA
## p. 7648 (#458) ###########################################
7648
JULIA WARD HOWE
Weave but the flag whose bars to-day
Drooped heavy o'er our early dead,
And homely garments, coarse and gray,
For orphans that must earn their bread!
Keep back your tunes, ye viols sweet,
That poured delight from other lands!
Rouse there the dancer's restless feet;
The trumpet leads our warrior bands.
And ye that wage the war of words
With mystic fame and subtle power,
Go, chatter to the idle birds,
Or teach the lesson of the hour!
Ye Sibyl Arts, in one stern knot
Be all your offices combined!
Stand close, while Courage draws the lot,
The destiny of human kind.
And if that destiny could fail,
The sun should darken in the sky,
The eternal bloom of Nature pale,
And God, and Truth, and Freedom die!
PARDON
PAIN
AINS the sharp sentence the breast in whose wrath it was uttered.
Now thou art cold;
Vengeance the headlong, and justice with purpose close muttered,
Loosen their hold.
Death brings atonement; he did that whereof ye accuse him,—
Murder accurst;
But, from the crisis of crime in which Satan did lose him,
Suffered the worst,
Harshly the red dawn arose on a deed of his doing,
Never to mend;
But harsher days he wore out in the bitter pursuing
And the wild end.
To lift the pale flag of truce, wrap those mysteries round him.
In whose avail
Madness that moved, and the swift retribution that found him,
Falter and fail.
## p. 7649 (#459) ###########################################
JULIA WARD HOWE
7649
So the soft purples that quiet the heavens with mourning,
Willing to fall,
Lend him one fold, his illustrious victim adorning
With wider pall.
Back to the cross, where the Savior, uplifted in dying,
Bade all souls live,
Turns the reft bosom of Nature, his mother, low sighing,
"Greatest, forgive! "
(HAMLET› AT THE BOSTON THEATRE
(EDWIN BOOTH)
VE SIT before the row of evening lamps,
Each in his chair,
W®
Forgetful of November dusks and damps,
And wintry air.
A little gulf of music intervenes,
A bridge of sighs,
Where still the cunning of the curtain screens
Art's paradise.
My thought transcends those viols' shrill delight,
The booming bass,
And towards the regions we shall view to-night
Makes hurried pace.
The painted castle, and the unneeded guard
That ready stand;
The harmless Ghost, that walks with helm unbarred
And beckoning hand;
And, beautiful as dreams of maidenhood,
That doubt defy,
Young Hamlet, with his forehead grief-subdued,
And visioning eye.
XIII-479
O fair dead world, that from thy grave awak'st
A little while,
And in our heart strange revolution mak'st
With thy brief smile!
O beauties vanished, fair lips magical,
Heroic braves!
## p. 7650 (#460) ###########################################
7650
JULIA WARD HOWE
O mighty hearts, that held the world in thrall!
Come from your graves!
The Poet sees you through a mist of tears,-
Such depths divide
Him, with the love and passion of his years,
From you, inside!
The Poet's heart attends your buskined feet,
Your lofty strains,
Till earth's rude touch dissolves that madness sweet,
And life remains:
Life that is something while the senses heed
The spirit's call,
Life that is nothing when our grosser need
Engulfs it all.
And thou, young hero of this mimic scene,
In whose high breast
A genius greater than thy life hath been
Strangely comprest!
Wear'st thou those glories draped about thy soul
Thou dost present?
And art thou by their feeling and control
Thus eloquent?
'Tis with no feignèd power thou bind'st our sense,
No shallow art:
Sure lavish Nature gave thee heritance
Of Hamlet's heart!
Thou dost control our fancies with a might
So wild, so fond,
We quarrel, passed thy circle of delight,
With things beyond;
Returning to the pillows rough with care,
And vulgar food,
Sad from the breath of that diviner air,
That loftier mood.
And there we leave thee, in thy misty tent
Watching alone;
While foes about thee gather imminent,
To us scarce known.
## p. 7651 (#461) ###########################################
JULIA WARD HOWE
7651
Oh, when the lights are quenched, the music hushed,
The plaudits still,
Heaven keep the fountain whence the fair stream gushed
From choking ill!
Let Shakespeare's soul, that wins the world from wrong,
For thee avail,
And not one holy maxim of his song
Before thee fail!
So get thee to thy couch as unreproved
As heroes blest;
And all good angels trusted in and loved
Attend thy rest!
Ο
A NEW SCUI OR
NCE to my Fancy's hall a stranger came,
Of mien unwonted,
And its pale shapes of glory without shame
Or speech confronted.
Fair was my hall,- a gallery of Gods
Smoothly appointed;
With Nymphs and Satyrs from the dewy sods
Freshly anointed.
Great Jove sat throned in state, with Hermes near,
And fiery Bacchus;
Pallas and Pluto, and those powers of Fear
Whose visions rack us.
Artemis wore her crescent free of stars,
The hunt just scented;
Glad Aphrodite met the warrior Mars,
The myriad-tented.
Rude was my visitant, of sturdy form,
Draped in such clothing
As the world's great, whom luxury makes warm,
Look on with loathing.
And yet, methought, his service-badge of soil
With honor wearing;
And in his dexter hand, embossed with toil,
A hammer bearing.
## p. 7652 (#462) ###########################################
7652
JULIA WARD HOWE
But while I waited till his eye should sink,
O'ercome of beauty,
With heart-impatience brimming to the brink
Of courteous duty,-
He smote my marbles many a murderous blow,
His weapon poising;
I, in my wrath and wonderment of woe,
No comment voicing.
"Come, sweep this rubbish from the workman's way,
Wreck of past ages;
Afford me here a lump of harmless clay,
Ye grooms and pages! "
Then from that voidness of our mother Earth
A frame he builded
Of a new feature, - with the power of birth
Fashioned and welded.
It had a might mine eyes had never seen,
A mien, a stature
As if the centuries that rolled between
Had greatened Nature.
It breathed, it moved; above Jove's classic sway
A place was won it:
The rustic sculptor motioned; then, "To-day »
He wrote upon it.
"What man art thou? " I cried, "and what this wrong
That thou hast wrought me?
My marbles lived on symmetry and song;
Why hast thou brought me
"A form of all necessities, that asks
Nurture and feeding?
Not this the burthen of my maidhood's tasks,
Nor my high breeding. "
"Behold," he said, "Life's great impersonate,
Nourished by Labor!
Thy gods are gone with old-time Faith and Fate;
Here is thy Neighbor. "
## p. 7652 (#463) ###########################################
## p. 7652 (#464) ###########################################
J
W. D. HOWELLS.
## p. 7652 (#465) ###########################################
1128
11,"
## p. 7652 (#466) ###########################################
WD HOWELLS.
## p. 7653 (#467) ###########################################
7653
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
(1837-)
OR the last twenty years William Dean Howells has occupied
a unique position among American men of letters.
It can
hardly be said that he is the leader of a school of fiction;
he is rather the exponent in this country of a school whose leaders
are the modern Russian novelists, and in which Tolstoy is the high-
est authority. The realism of 'Anna Karénina' is also the realism
of Silas Lapham. ' Both works- the one a tragedy, the other a seri-
ous comedy-are steeped in the atmosphere of fact; an atmosphere
in which there are no mists of idealism and no elusive distances.
Howells perceived early the rich field which American life offers to
the writer of realistic fiction. The American people are yet too young
for mellowed romance; they are still in the literal period of youth.
The painter of Silas Lapham and of Lemuel Barker embodies this
frank noonday spirit of average life in his novels; only in his essays
and poems does he allow himself occasional truancies from the school
of the actual. He was himself peculiarly fitted by birth, education,
and training, to obtain a firm hold upon the unromantic, humorous,
pathetic life of the every-day American man and woman; to under-
stand its gaucheries, its brave nonchalance, its splendid attempts and
prophetic failures. William Dean Howells is an American of Ameri-
cans. He was born in Ohio in 1837, of a family founded originally
by Welsh Quakers, but closely resembling the families of Transcend-
ental New England in its habits of religious and philosophical
thought; in its simplicity of living; in its simple and democratic
tastes. During the boyhood of the author, his father owned and pub-
lished daily papers in Hamilton and in Dayton, Ohio, successively.
The son learned the printer's trade, and gradually the whole business
of conducting a newspaper. In his latest published work, 'Impres-
sions and Experiences,' he has embodied his recollections of this
apprenticeship in an essay of great charm. At the age of nineteen
he became the Columbus correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette.
At twenty-two he was appointed news editor of the State Journal at
Columbus. About this time he published a volume of verse.
Although Howells is a realist in his literary methods, there have
always been imaginative elements in his prose work; and from the
day when as a young man he published a slim volume of lyrics with
## p. 7654 (#468) ###########################################
7654
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
his friend Piatt, he has been a poet. The early verse was graceful,
musical, distinctive; the later, deeper work, gathered into the striking
volume 'Stops of Various Quills' (1895), shows Howells's intense inter-
est in the great modern social problems, and his yearning brotherli-
ness. The brooding minor note is constant in these haunting poems,
which are rich in suggestion, full of noble thought and feeling, and
in their simple, almost bald diction, at times both touching and
beautiful.
His consulship at Venice, 1861-65, prepared him by its liberalizing
influences for the more cosmopolitan demands of the essay and the
novel. His impressions of his sojourn were embodied in 'Venetian
Life,' a book which revealed the qualities of his literary talent: his
powers of minute and kindly observation; his sense of the pictur-
esque; his close adhesion to delicate particulars, to expressive details,
to significant facts.
His subsequent residence in New York City, as a writer for the
Tribune and the Nation, paved the way still further for his fiction
writing. It was not until 1871, when he had become the assistant
editor of the Atlantic Monthly, that he ventured into this field. His
first novel, Their Wedding Journey,' was instantly recognized as
something more than a well-told story. It was a transcript of two
very human lives. Its spirit of actuality was new in American fiction.
Its homeliness, its pleasantry, its every-day character, at once secured
its popularity. It was followed by a long succession of well-written
novels. If he had had no other claims upon the allegiance of those
anxious to establish high literary standards in this country, Howells
would still deserve the approval of the most critical lovers of litera-
ture for his delicate and conscientious workmanship. He has set a
much-needed example of carefulness and thoughtfulness in style and
construction. He has the conscience, the instinct, and the taste of an
artist. Though a deliberate, he has however been a prolific writer.
Almost every year since 1871 has brought forth a novel. 'A Chance
Acquaintance' appeared in 1873; A Foregone Conclusion' in 1874:
'Out of the Question' in 1876, and 'A Counterfeit Presentment' in
1877,- both cast in drama form; The Lady of the Aroostook' in
1878; The Undiscovered Country' in 1880; 'A Fearful Responsibil-
ity in 1882; 'Dr. Breen's Practice' in 1883; A Modern Instance' in
1883; A Woman's Reason' in 1884; Three Villages' in 1885; and
later The Rise of Silas Lapham,' 'Annie Kilburn,' 'April Hopes,'
'A Hazard of New Fortunes,' The Shadow of a Dream,' and numer-
ous farces which have appeared from time to time in various maga-
zines. The Rise of Silas Lapham' is a finely representative novel
of what may be called the middle period of Howells's development.
It is a triumph of realism; it is thoroughly and broadly American in
## p. 7655 (#469) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7655
tone; it is instinct with kindly human sympathy. The novelist has
a true comprehension of the "common people," especially of the
common people as they are found in these United States: fixed mem-
bers of no class, endowed with many virtues, destitute of traditions,—
the First Man or the First Woman, for all practical purposes, in a
new world; God-fearing, money-making persons, acknowledging no
superiors in theory, but always awed by their "betters» in fact.
These types appear and reappear in Howells's stories; he is the Dick-
ens of the self-made man. Silas Lapham is born a poor boy, of hon-
est parents, without educational or social opportunities. He makes his
money in mineral paint. His daughters are
His daughters are as much in advance of
him and his crude successes as the second generation of the newly
rich usually is in this country. By a series of accidents this family
of American types is thrown with gentlefolk of Boston. The usual
little tragedies and comedies ensue. The story is told with consum-
mate skill. Its objectivity is heightened by the author's fidelity to the
facts of the case. Its humor is unmistakable.
Moreover, it is writ-
ten with that marvelous clearness of diction, that easy command of
current idiom, which constitute Howells's strongest claim to a great
style. The author says what he means in unmistakable language.
He never sacrifices lucidity to effect. He never indulges in mere
word-painting. His essays are as satisfactory as his novels in this
respect.
Mr. Howells's latest phase, that in which he shows a deep desire
to understand and set forth the strenuous American social problems,
-the meaning of socialism, the relations of labor and capital, and,
more broadly, the mystery of poverty and of human suffering,—is
typified in a book like 'A Hazard of New Fortunes. It is American
in its scenes and characters, and all through it is a sense of the dra-
matic unrest of current conditions in a great city like New York,—
the stormy and pathetic episode quoted being the culmination of
causes which attract the most earnest thought of Howells, an ideal
statement thereof coming out in such a volume as the suggestive 'A
Traveler from Altruria. '
The absence of idealism in Howells's writings has been cited as
their gravest defect; but it is by no means true that he excludes the
ideal sides of life from treatment. In the main, however, it is enough
for him to present the lives of men without comment, after nature's
own fashion. The American world of letters owes him a lasting debt
of gratitude in that he has made his presentation with fidelity to a
high ideal of artistic excellence. Since the year 1881, when he re-
signed the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, he has lived first in
Boston and later in New York, devoting himself to the writing of
novels, essays, and miscellaneous sketches. In these novels and in
¡
## p. 7656 (#470) ###########################################
7656
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
his occasional essays his hand preserves its cunning, and his writing
always has that indefinable charm which is the enduring note in
good literature. And to the charm is added the broad outlook and
the deep ethical interest which are typical of the man in the ripe
maturity of his powers.
THE BEWILDERED GUEST
From Stops of Various Quills. Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
WAS not asked if I should like to come.
I
I have not seen my host here since I came,
Or had a word of welcome in his name.
Some say that we shall never see him, and some
That we shall see him elsewhere, and then know
Why we were bid. How long I am to stay
I have not the least notion. None, they say,
Was ever told when he should come or go.
But every now and then there bursts upon
The song and mirth a lamentable noise,
A sound of shrieks and sobs, that strikes our joys
Dumb in our breasts; and then, some one is gone.
They say we meet him. None knows where or when.
We know we shall not meet him here again.
WR
HOPE
From Stops of Various Quills. Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
E SAILED and sailed upon the desert sea
Where for whole days we alone seemed to be.
At last we saw a dim, vague line arise
Between the empty billows and the skies,
That grew and grew until it wore the shape
Of cove and inlet, promontory and cape;
Then hills and valleys, rivers, fields, and woods,
Steeples and roofs, and village neighborhoods.
And then I thought, "Sometime I shall embark
Upon a sea more desert and more dark
Than ever this was, and between the skies
And empty billows I shall see arise
Another world out of that waste and lapse,
Like yonder land. Perhaps - perhaps - perhaps! "
## p. 7657 (#471) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7657
SOCIETY
Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
From Stops of Various Quills.
I
LOOKED, and saw a splendid pageantry
Of beautiful women and of lordly men,
Taking their pleasure in a flowery plain,
Where poppies and the red anemone,
And many another leaf of cramoisy,
Flickered about their feet, and gave their stain
To heels of iron or satin, and the grain
Of silken garments floating far and free,
As in the dance they wove themselves, or strayed
By twos together, or lightly smiled and bowed,
Or curtsied to each other, or else played
At games of mirth and pastime, unafraid
In their delight; and all so high and proud
They seemed scarce of the earth whereon they trod.
I looked again, and saw that flowery space
Stirring, as if alive, beneath the tread
That rested now upon an old man's head,
And now upon a baby's gasping face,
Or mother's bosom, or the rounded grace
Of a girl's throat; and what had seemed the red
Of flowers was blood, in gouts and gushes shed
From hearts that broke under that frolic pace.
And now and then from out the dreadful floor
An arm or brow was lifted from the rest,
As if to strike in madness, or implore
For mercy; and anon some suffering breast
Heaved from the mass and sank; and as before
The revelers above them thronged and prest.
ANOTHER DAY
From Stops of Various Quills. Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
A
NOTHER day, and with it that brute joy,
Or that prophetic rapture of the boy
Whom every morning brings as glad a breath
As if it dawned upon the end of death!
All other days have run the common course,
And left me at their going neither worse
## p. 7658 (#472) ###########################################
7658
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Nor better for them; only a little older,
A little sadder, and a little colder.
But this it seems as if this day might be
The day I somehow always thought to see,
And that should come to bless me past the scope
And measure of my farthest-reaching hope.
―――
To-day, maybe, the things that were concealed
Before the first day was, shall be revealed;
The riddle of our misery shall be read,
And it be clear whether the dead are dead.
Before this sun shall sink into the west
The tired earth may have fallen on his breast,
And into heaven the world have passed away.
At any rate, it is another day!
A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM
From Their Wedding Journey. Copyright 1871 and 1894, by W. D. Howells.
Reprinted by permission of the author, and of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. ,
publishers.
TH
HEY had waited to see Leonard, in order that they might
learn better how to find his house in the country; and now,
when they came in upon him at nine o'clock, he welcomed
them with all his friendly heart. He rose from the pile of morn-
ing's letters to which he had but just sat down; he placed them
the easiest chairs; he made a feint of its not being a busy hour
with him, and would have had them look upon his office, which
was still damp and odorous from the porter's broom, as a kind of
down-town parlor: but after they had briefly accounted to his
amazement for their appearance then and there, and Isabel had
boasted of the original fashion in which they had that morning
seen New York, they took pity on him and bade him adieu till
evening.
They crossed from Broadway to the noisome street by the
ferry, and in a little while had taken their places in the train on
the thither side of the water.
"Don't tell me, Basil," said Isabel, "that Leonard travels fifty
miles every day by rail going to and from his work! "
"I must, dearest, if I would be truthful. "
## p. 7659 (#473) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7659
«< Then, darling, there are worse things in this world than
living up at the South End, aren't there? " And in agreement
upon Boston as a place of the greatest natural advantages, as
well as all acquirable merits, with after-talk that need not be
recorded, they arrived in the best humor at the little country
station near which the Leonards dwelt.
I must inevitably follow Mrs. Isabel thither, though I do it
at the cost of the reader, who suspects the excitements which a
long description of the movement would delay. The ladies were
very old friends, and they had not met since Isabel's return from
Europe and renewal of her engagement. Upon the news of this,
Mrs. Leonard had swallowed with surprising ease all that she
had said in blame of Basil's conduct during the rupture, and
exacted a promise from her friend that she should pay her the
first visit after their marriage. And now that they had come
together, their only talk was of husbands, whom they viewed in
every light to which husbands could be turned, and still found
an inexhaustible novelty in the theme. Mrs. Leonard beheld in
her friend's joy the sweet reflection of her own honeymoon, and
Isabel was pleased to look upon the prosperous marriage of the
former as the image of her future. Thus, with immense profit
and comfort, they reassured one another by every question and
answer, and in their weak content lapsed far behind the repre-
sentative women of our age, when husbands are at best a neces-
sary evil, and the relation of wives to them is known to be one
of pitiable subjection. When these two pretty fogies put their
heads of false hair together, they were as silly and benighted as
their great-grandmothers could have been in the same circum-
stances, and as I say, shamefully encouraged each other in their
absurdity. The absurdity appeared too good and blessed to be
true. "Do you really suppose, Basil," Isabel would say to her
oppressor, after having given him some elegant extract from the
last conversation upon husbands, "that we shall get on as smoothly
as the Leonards when we have been married ten years? Lucy
says that things go more hitchily the first year than ever they
do afterwards, and that people love each other better and better,
just because they've got used to it. Well, our bliss does seem a
little crude and garish compared with their happiness; and yet"
-she put up both her palms against his, and gave a vehement
little push"there is something agreeable about it, even at this
stage of the proceedings. "
## p. 7660 (#474) ###########################################
7660
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
"Isabel," said her husband with severity, "this is bridal! ”
"No matter! I only want to seem an old married woman to
the general public. But the application of it is that you must be
careful not to contradict me, or cross me in anything, so that we
can be like the Leonards very much sooner than they became so.
The great object is not to have any hitchiness; and you know
you are provoking—at times. "
They both educated themselves for continued and tranquil
happiness by the example and precept of their friends; and the
time passed swiftly in the pleasant learning, and in the novelty
of the life led by the Leonards. This indeed merits a closer
study than can be given here, for it is the life led by vast num-
bers of prosperous New-Yorkers who love both the excitement of
the city and the repose of the country, and who aspire to unite
the enjoyment of both in their daily existence. The suburbs of
the metropolis stretch landward fifty miles in every direction; and
everywhere are handsome villas like Leonard's, inhabited by men
like himself, whom strict study of the time-table enables to spend
all their working hours in the city and all their smoking and
sleeping hours in the country.
The home and the neighborhood of the Leonards put on their
best looks for our bridal pair, and they were charmed. They all
enjoyed the visit, said guests and hosts, they were all sorry to
have it come to an end; yet they all resigned themselves to this
conclusion. Practically, it had no other result than to detain the
travelers into the very heart of the hot weather. In that weather
it was easy to do anything that did not require an active effort,
and resignation was so natural with the mercury at ninety, that
I am not sure but there was something sinful in it.
They had given up their cherished purpose of going to Albany
by the day boat, which was represented to them in every impos
sible phase. It would be dreadfully crowded, and whenever it
stopped the heat would be insupportable. Besides, it would bring
them to Albany at an hour when they must either spend the
night there, or push on to Niagara by the night train. "You
had better go by the evening boat. It will be light almost till
you reach West Point, and you'll see all the best scenery. Then
you can get a good night's rest, and start fresh in the morning. "
So they were counseled, and they assented, as they would have
done if they had been advised: "You had better go by the
morning boat. It's deliciously cool, traveling; you see the whole
## p. 7661 (#475) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7661
of the river; you reach Albany for supper, and you push through
to Niagara that night and are done with it. "
They took leave of Leonard at breakfast and of his wife at
noon, and fifteen minutes later they were rushing from the heat
of the country into the heat of the city, where some affairs and
pleasures were to employ them till the evening boat should start.
Their spirits were low, for the terrible spell of the great heat
brooded upon them. All abroad burned the fierce white light of
the sun, in which not only the earth seemed to parch and thirst,
but the very air withered, and was faint and thin to the troubled
respiration. Their train was full of people who had come long
journeys from broiling cities of the West, and who were dusty
and ashen and reeking in the slumbers at which some of them
still vainly caught. On every one lay an awful languor. Here
and there stirred a fan, like the broken wing of a dying bird;
now and then a sweltering young mother shifted her hot baby
from one arm to another; after every station the desperate con-
ductor swung through the long aisle and punched the ticket,
which each passenger seemed to yield him with a tacit maledic-
tion; a suffering child hung about the empty tank, which could
only gasp out a cindery drop or two of ice-water. The wind
buffeted faintly at the windows; when the door was opened, the
clatter of rails struck through and through the car like a de-
moniac yell.
Yet when they arrived at the station by the ferry-side, they
seemed to have entered its stifling darkness from fresh and vig-
orous atmosphere, so close and dead and mixed with the carbonic
breath of the locomotives was the air of the place. The thin old
wooden walls that shut out the glare of the sun transmitted an
intensified warmth; the roof seemed to hover lower and lower,
and in its coal-smoked, raftery hollow to generate a heat deadlier
than that poured upon it from the skies.
In a convenient place in the station hung a thermometer,
before which every passenger, on going aboard the ferry-boat,
paused as at a shrine, and mutely paid his devotions. At the
altar of this fetich our friends also paused, and saw that the
mercury was above ninety; and, exulting with the pride that sav
ages take in the cruel might of their idols, bowed their souls to
the great god Heat.
On the boat they found a place where the breath of the
sea struck cool across their faces, and made them forget the
## p. 7662 (#476) ###########################################
7662
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
thermometer for the brief time of the transit. But presently
they drew near that strange irregular row of wooden buildings
and jutting piers which skirts the river on the New York side;
and before the boat's motion ceased the air grew thick and warm
again, and tainted with the foulness of the street on which the
buildings front. Upon this the boat's passengers issued, passing
up through the gangway, on one side of which a throng of
return passengers was pent by a gate of iron bars, like a herd
of wild animals. They were streaming with perspiration, and
according to their different temperaments had faces of deep crim-
son or deadly pallor.
"Now the question is, my dear," said Basil, when free of the
press they lingered for a moment in the shade outside, "whether
we had better walk up to Broadway, at an immediate sacrifice of
fibre, and get a stage there, or take one of these cars here and
be landed a little nearer, with half the exertion. By this route
we shall have sights and smells which the other can't offer us,
but whichever we take we shall be sorry. "
"Then I say take this," decided Isabel. "I want to be sorry
upon the easiest possible terms, this weather. "
They hailed the first car that passed, and got into it. Well
for them both if she could have exercised this philosophy with
regard to the whole day's business, or if she could have given
up her plans for it with the same resignation she had practiced
in regard to the day boat! It seems to me a proof of the small
advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so
hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do. It matters
very little whether the affair is one of enjoyment or of business,
we feel the same bitter need of pursuing it to the end. The
mere fact of intention gives it a flavor of duty; and dutiolatry, as
one may call the devotion, has passed so deeply into our life that
we have scarcely a sense any more of the sweetness of even a
neglected pleasure. We will not taste the fine, guilty rapture
of a deliberate dereliction; the gentle sin of omission is all but
blotted from the calendar of our crimes. If I had been Colum-
bus, I should have thought twice before setting sail, when I was
quite ready to do so; and as for Plymouth Rock, I should have
sternly resisted the blandishments of those twin sirens, Starvation
and Cold, who beckoned the Puritans shoreward, and as soon as
ever I came into sight of their granite perch should have turned
back to England. But it is now too late to repair these errors;
## p. 7663 (#477) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7663
and so, on one of the hottest days of last year, behold my obdu-
rate bridal pair, in a Tenth or Twentieth Avenue horse-car, setting
forth upon the fulfillment of a series of intentions, any of which
had wiselier been left unaccomplished.
Isabel had said they
would call upon certain people in Fiftieth Street, and then shop
slowly down, ice-creaming and staging and variously cooling and
calming by the way, until they reached the ticket office on
Broadway, whence they could indefinitely betake themselves to
the steamboat an hour or two before her departure. She felt
that they had yielded sufficiently to circumstances and conditions.
already on this journey, and she was resolved that the present
half-day in New York should be the half-day of her original
design.
It was not the most advisable thing, as I have allowed; but it
was inevitable, and it afforded them a spectacle which is by no
means wanting in sublimity, and which is certainly unique,— the
spectacle of that great city on a hot day, defiant of the elements.
and prospering on, with every form of labor and at a terrible
cost of life. The man carrying the hod to the top of the walls,
that rankly grow and grow as from his life's blood, will only lay
down his load when he feels the mortal glare of the sun blaze
in upon heart and brain; the plethoric millionaire for whom he
toils will plot and plan in his office till he swoons at the desk;
the trembling beast must stagger forward while the flame-faced
tormentor on the box has strength to lash him on: in all those
vast palaces of commerce there are ceaseless sale and purchase,
packing and unpacking, lifting up and laying down, arriving and
departing loads; in thousands of shops is the unspared and
unsparing weariness of selling; in the street, filled by the hurry
and suffering of tens of thousands, is the weariness of buying.
Their afternoon's experience was something that Basil and
Isabel could, when it was past, look upon only as a kind of vis-
ion, magnificent at times, and at other times full of indignity and
pain. They seemed to have dreamed of a long horse-car pilgrim-
age through that squalid street by the river-side; where presently
they came to a market, opening upon the view hideous vistas of
carnage, and then into a wide avenue, with processions of cars
like their own coming and going up and down the centre of a
foolish and useless breadth, which made even the tall buildings
(rising gauntly up among the older houses of one or two stories)
on either hand look low, and let in the sun to bake the dust
## p. 7664 (#478) ###########################################
7664
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
that the hot breaths of wind caught up and sent swirling into
the shabby shops. Here they dreamed of the eternal demolition
and construction of the city, and farther on of vacant lots full of
granite bowlders, clambered over by goats. In their dream they
had fellow-passengers, whose sufferings made them odious, and
whom they were glad to leave behind when they alighted from
the car, and running out of the blaze of the avenue quenched
themselves in the shade of the cross street. A little strip of
shadow lay along the row of brown-stone fronts, but there were
intervals where the vacant lots cast no shadow.
With great
bestowal of thought they studied hopelessly how to avoid these
spaces, as if they had been difficult torrents or vast expanses
of desert sand; they crept slowly along till they came to such a
place, and dashed swiftly across it, and then, fainter than before,
moved on.
They seemed now and then to stand at doors, and to
be told that people were out, and again that they were in; and
they had a sense of cool dark parlors, and the airy rustling of
light-muslined ladies, of chat and of fans and ice-water, and then
they came forth again; and evermore
"The day increased from heat to heat. "
At last they were aware of an end of their visits, and of a
purpose to go down-town again, and of seeking the nearest car
by endless blocks of brown-stone fronts, which with their eter-
nal brown-stone flights of steps, and their handsome, intolerable
uniformity, oppressed them like a procession of houses trying
to pass a given point and never getting by. Upon these streets
there was seldom a soul to be seen; so that when their ringing
at a door had evoked answer, it had startled them with vague,
sad surprise. In the distance on either hand they could see cars
and carts and wagons toiling up and down the avenues, and on
the next intersecting pavement sometimes a laborer with his
jacket slung across his shoulder, or a dog that had plainly made
up his mind to go mad. Up to the time of their getting into
one of those phantasmal cars for the return down-townwards they
had kept up a show of talk in their wretched dream. They had
spoken of other hot days that they had known elsewhere; and
they had wondered that the tragical character of heat had been
so little recognized. They said that the daily New York murder
might even at that moment be somewhere taking place, and that
no murder of the whole homicidal year could have such proper
## p. 7665 (#479) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7665
circumstance; they morbidly wondered what that day's murder
would be, and in what swarming tenement-house, or den of the
assassin streets by the river-sides,- if indeed it did not befall in
some such high, close-shuttered, handsome dwelling as those they
passed, in whose twilight it would be so easy to strike down the
master, and leave him undiscovered and unmourned by the fam-
ily ignorantly absent at the mountains or the seaside. They
conjectured of the horror of midsummer battles, and pictured the
anguish of shipwrecked men upon a tropical coast, and the grimy
misery of stevedores unloading shiny cargoes of anthracite coal
at city docks. But now at last, as they took seats opposite one
another in the crowded car, they seemed to have drifted infinite
distances and long epochs asunder. They looked hopelessly across
the intervening gulf, and mutely questioned when it was and
from what far city they or some remote ancestors of theirs had
set forth upon a wedding journey. They bade each other a tacit
farewell, and with patient, pathetic faces awaited the end of the
world.
When they alighted, they took their way up through one of
the streets of the great wholesale businesses, to Broadway. On
this street was a throng of trucks and wagons lading and unlad-
ing; bales and boxes rose and sank by pulleys overhead; the
footway was a labyrinth of packages of every shape and size:
there was no flagging of the pitiless energy that moved all
forward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on it, save in the
reeking faces of its helpless instruments. But when the wedding-
journeyers emerged upon Broadway, the other passages and inci-
dents of their dream faded before the superior fantasticality of
the spectacle. It was four o'clock, the deadliest hour of the
deadly summer day. The spiritless air seemed to have a quality
of blackness in it, as if filled with the gloom of low-hovering
wings. One half the street lay in shadow, and one half in sun;
but the sunshine itself was dim, as if a heat greater than its own
had smitten it with languor. Little gusts of sick, warm wind
blew across the great avenue at the corners of the intersecting
streets. In the upward distance, at which the journeyers looked,
the loftier roofs and steeples lifted themselves dim out of the
livid atmosphere, and far up and down the length of the street
swept a stream of tormented life. All sorts of wheeled things
thronged it, conspicuous among which rolled and jarred the gaud-
ily painted stages, with quivering horses driven each by a man
XIII-480
## p. 7666 (#480) ###########################################
7666
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
It
who sat in the shade of a branching white umbrella, and suffered
with a moody truculence of aspect, and as if he harbored the bit-
terness of death in his heart for the crowding passengers within,
when one of them pulled the strap about his legs and sum-
moned him to halt. Most of the foot passengers kept to the
shady side; and to the unaccustomed eyes of the strangers they
were not less in number than at any other time, though there
were fewer women among them. Indomitably resolute of soul,
they held their course with the swift pace of custom, and only
here and there they showed the effect of the heat.
One man,
collarless, with waistcoat unbuttoned and hat set far back from
his forehead, waved a fan before his death-white flabby face, and
set down one foot after the other with the heaviness of a som-
nambulist. Another, as they passed him, was saying huskily to
the friend at his side, "I can't stand this much longer. My
hands tingle as if they had gone to sleep; my heart—" But
still the multitude hurried on, passing, repassing, encountering,
evading, vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dis-
persing down the side streets and swarming out of them.
was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination,
and in its effect of universal lunacy it might well have seemed
the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who
were in it but not of it, as they fancied,- though there was no
reason for this,-looked on it amazed; and at last, their own
errands being accomplished, and themselves so far cured of the
madness of purpose, they cried with one voice that it was a hid-
eous sight, and strove to take refuge from it in the nearest place
where the soda fountain sparkled. It was a vain desire. At the
front door of the apothecary's hung a thermometer, and as they
entered they heard the next comer cry out, with a maniacal pride
in the affliction laid upon mankind, "Ninety-seven degrees! "
Behind them at the door there poured in a ceaseless stream of
people, each pausing at the shrine of heat before he tossed off
the hissing draught that two pale, close-clipped boys served them
from either side of the fountain. Then in the order of their
coming they issued through another door upon the side street;
each, as he disappeared, turning his face half round, and casting
a casual glance upon a little group near another counter. The
group was of a very patient, half frightened, half puzzled looking
gentleman who sat perfectly still on a stool, and of a lady who
stood beside him, rubbing all over his head a handkerchief full
## p. 7667 (#481) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7667
of pounded ice, and easing one hand with the other when the
first became tired. Basil drank his soda and paused to look
upon this group, which he felt would commend itself to realistic
sculpture as eminently characteristic of the local life, and as "The
Sunstroke" would sell enormously in the hot season.
« Better
take a little more of that," the apothecary said, looking up from
his prescription, and at the organized sympathy of the seemingly
indifferent crowd smiling very kindly at his patient, who there-
upon tasted something in the glass he held. "Do you still feel
like fainting? " asked the humane authority. "Slightly, now and
then," answered the other; "but I'm hanging on hard to the
bottom curve of that icicled S on your soda fountain, and I feel
that I'm all right as long as I can see that. The people get
rather hazy occasionally, and have no features to speak of. But
I don't know that I look very impressive myself," he added, in
the jesting mood which seems the natural condition of Ameri-
cans in the face of all embarrassments.
"Oh, you'll do! " the apothecary answered with a laugh; but
he said, in answer to an anxious question from the lady, "He
mustn't be moved for an hour yet," and gayly pestled away at a
prescription, while she resumed her office of grinding the pounded
ice round and round upon her husband's skull. Isabel offered
her the commiseration of friendly words, and of looks kinder yet;
and then, seeing that they could do nothing, she and Basil fell
into the endless procession, and passed out of the side door.
"What a shocking thing! " she whispered. "Did you see how
all the people looked, one after another, so indifferently at that
couple, and evidently forgot them the next instant?
It was
dreadful. I shouldn't like to have you sunstruck in New York. ”
"That's very considerate of you; but place for place, if any
accident must happen to me among strangers, I think I should
prefer to have it in New York. The biggest place is always the
kindest as well as the cruelest place. Amongst the thousands of
spectators the good Samaritan as well as the Levite would be
sure to be. As for a sunstroke, it requires peculiar gifts. But
if you compel me to a choice in the matter, then I say, give
me the busiest part of Broadway for a sunstroke. There is such
experience of calamity there that you could hardly fall the first
victim to any misfortune. Probably the gentleman at the apothe-
cary's was merely exhausted by the heat, and ran in there for
revival. The apothecary has a case of the kind on his hands
## p. 7668 (#482) ###########################################
7668
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
every blazing afternoon, and knows just what to do. The crowd
may be a little ennuyé of sunstrokes, and to that degree indif-
ferent; but they most likely know that they can only do harm by
an expression of sympathy, and so they delegate their pity as
they have delegated their helpfulness, to the proper authority, and
go about their business. If a man was overcome in the middle
of a village street, the blundering country druggist wouldn't know
what to do, and the tender-hearted people would crowd about so
that no breath of air could reach the victim. "
"Maybe so, dear," said the wife pensively; "but if anything
did happen to you in New York, I should like to have the spec-
tators look as if they saw a human being in trouble. Perhaps
I'm a little exacting. "
"I think you are.
Nothing is so hard as to understand that
there are human beings in this world besides one's self and
one's set. But let us be selfishly thankful that it isn't you and
I there in the apothecary's shop, as it might very well be; and
let us get to the boat as soon as we can, and end this horrible
midsummer-day's dream.
