ss, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of
phrasing--he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing
world. SUSTAINED. I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There
are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but
only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches
of veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells's moon sails
cloudless skies all night and all the nights.

In the matter of verbal exactness Mr. Howells has no superior, I
suppose. He seems to be almost always able to find that elusive and
shifty grain of gold, the RIGHT WORD. Others have to put up with
approximations, more or less frequently; he has better luck. To me, the
others are miners working with the gold-pan--of necessity some of the
gold washes over and escapes; whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver
raiding down a riffle--no grain of the metal stands much chance of
eluding him. A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's
way and makes it plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and
much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do
not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when THE right
one blazes out on us. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right
words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well
as spiritual, and electrically prompt: it tingles exquisitely around
through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good
as the autumn-butter that creams the sumac-berry. One has no time to
examine the word and vote upon its rank and standing, the automatic
recognition of its supremacy is so immediate. There is a plenty of
acceptable literature which deals largely in approximations, but it may
be likened to a fine landscape seen through the rain; the right word
would dismiss the rain, then you would see it better. It doesn't rain
when Howells is at work.

And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his speech? and
its cadenced and undulating rhythm? and its architectural felicities
of construction, its graces of expression, its pemmican quality of
compression, and all that? Born to him, no doubt. All in shining good
order in the beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining, just
as extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear
and use. He passed his fortieth year long and long ago; but I think his
English of today--his perfect Englis