ealth hold themselves
different from other men.

Commonly he did not keep things to himself, especially dislikes and
condemnations. Upon most current events he had strong opinions, and he
uttered them strongly. After a while he was silent in them, but if you
tried him you found him in them still. He was tremendously worked up by
a certain famous trial, as most of us were who lived in the time of it.
He believed the accused guilty, but when we met some months after it was
over, and I tempted him to speak his mind upon it, he would only say. The
man had suffered enough; as if the man had expiated his wrong, and he was
not going to do anything to renew his penalty. I found that very
curious, very delicate. His continued blame could not come to the
sufferer's knowledge, but he felt it his duty to forbear it.

He was apt to wear himself out in the vehemence of his resentments; or,
he had so spent himself in uttering them that he had literally nothing
more to say. You could offer Clemens offences that would anger other men
and he did not mind; he would account for them from human nature; but if
he thought you had in any way played him false you were anathema and
maranatha forever. Yet not forever, perhaps, for by and-by, after years,
he would be silent. There were two men, half a generation apart in their
succession, whom he thought equally atrocious in their treason to him,
and of whom he used to talk terrifyingly, even after they were out of the
world. He went farther than Heine, who said that he forgave his enemies,
but not till they were dead. Clemens did not forgive his dead enemies;
their death seemed to deepen their crimes, like a base evasion, or a
cowardly attempt to escape; he pursued them to the grave; he would like
to dig them up and take vengeance upon their clay. So he said, but no
doubt he would not have hurt them if he had had them living before him.
He was generous without stint; he trusted without measure, but where his
generosity was abused, or his trust betrayed, he was a fire of vengeance,
a consuming flame of suspicion that no sprinkling of cool patience from
others could quench; it had to burn itself out. He was eagerly and
lavishly hospitable, but if a man seemed willing to batten on him, or in
any way to lie down upon him, Clemens despised him unutterably. In his
frenzies of resentment or suspicion he would not, and doubtless could
not, listen to reason. But if between the paroxysms he were confronted