d them), I have no hesitation in expressing here my own conviction
that the man who has given us four scenes like these is to be compared
with the masters of literature; and that he can abide the comparison
with equanimity.

IV

Perhaps I myself prefer these three Mississippi Valley books above all
Mark Twain's other writings (altho with no lack of affection for those
also) partly because these have the most of the flavor of the soil about
them. After veracity and the sense of the universal, what I best relish
in literature is this native aroma, pungent, homely, and abiding. Yet I
feel sure that I should not rate him so high if he were the author of
these three books only. They are the best of him, but the others are
good also, and good in a different way. Other writers have given us
this local color more or less artistically, more or less convincingly:
one New England and another New York, a third Virginia, and a fourth
Georgia, and a fifth Wisconsin; but who so well as Mark Twain has given
us the full spectrum of the Union? With all his exactness in reproducing
the Mississippi Valley, Mark Twain is not sectional in his outlook; he
is national always. He is not narrow; he is not western or eastern; he
is American with a certain largeness and boldness and freedom and
certainty that we like to think of as befitting a country so vast as
ours and a people so independent.

In Mark Twain we have "the national spirit as seen with our own eyes,"
declared Mr. Howells; and, from more points of view than one, Mark Twain
seems to me to be the very embodiment of Americanism. Self-educated in
the hard school of life, he has gone on broadening his outlook as he has
grown older. Spending many years abroad, he has come to understand other
nationalities, without enfeebling his own native faith. Combining a
mastery of the commonplace with an imaginative faculty, he is a
practical idealist. No respecter of persons, he has a tender regard for
his fellowman. Irreverent toward all outworn superstitions, he has ever
revealed the deepest respect for all things truly worthy of reverence.
Unwilling to take pay in words, he is impatient always to get at the
root of the matter, to pierce to the center, to see the thing as it is.
He has a habit of standing upright, of thinking for himself, and of
hitting hard at whatsoever seems to him hateful and mean; but at the
core of him there is genuine gentleness and honest sympathy, brave
humanity and