ls's moon shines and sails all night long."
When the instalments of The Rise of Silas Lapham began to appear, he
overflowed in adjectives, the sincerity of which we need not doubt,
in view of his quite open criticisms of the author's reading
delivery.

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Belmont, Mass.:

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I am in a state of wild enthusiasm over this
July instalment of your story. It's perfectly dazzling--it's
masterly--incomparable. Yet I heard you read it--without losing my
balance. Well, the difference between your reading and your writing
is-remarkable. I mean, in the effects produced and the impression left
behind. Why, the one is to the other as is one of Joe Twichell's yarns
repeated by a somnambulist. Goodness gracious, you read me a chapter,
and it is a gentle, pearly dawn, with a sprinkle of faint stars in it;
but by and by I strike it in print, and shout to myself, "God bless us,
how has that pallid former spectacle been turned into these gorgeous
sunset splendors!"

Well, I don't care how much you read your truck to me, you can't
permanently damage it for me that way. It is always perfectly fresh and
dazzling when I come on it in the magazine. Of course I recognize the
form of it as being familiar--but that is all. That is, I remember it as
pyrotechnic figures which you set up before me, dead and cold, but
ready for the match--and now I see them touched off and all ablaze with
blinding fires. You can read, if you want to, but you don't read worth
a damn. I know you can read, because your readings of Cable and your
repeatings of the German doctor's remarks prove that.

That's the best drunk scene--because the truest--that I ever read. There
are touches in it that I never saw any writer take note of before. And
they are set before the reader with amazing accuracy. How very drunk,
and how recently drunk, and how altogether admirably drunk you must have
been to enable you to contrive that masterpiece!

Why I didn't notice that that religious interview between Marcia and
Mrs. Halleck was so deliciously humorous when you read it to me--but
dear me, it's just too lovely for anything. (Wrote Clark to collar it
for the "Library.")

Hang it, I know where the mystery is, now; when you are reading, you
glide right along, and I don't get a chance to let the things soak home;
but when I catch it in the magazine, I give a page 20 or 30 minutes in
which to gently and thoroughly filte