not think that twenty-three was so very young, but
perhaps it was; and if any one were to say that I had been portraying
here a youth whose aims were certainly beyond his achievements, who was
morbidly sensitive, and if not conceited was intolerably conscious, who
had met with incredible kindness, and had suffered no more than was good
for him, though he might not have merited his pain any more than his joy,
I do not know that I should gainsay him, for I am not at all sure that I
was not just that kind of youth when I paid my first visit to New
England.

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--First Impressions of Literary New
York

by William Dean Howells

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK

It was by boat that I arrived from Boston, on an August morning of 1860,
which was probably of the same quality as an August morning of 1900. I
used not to mind the weather much in those days; it was hot or it was
cold, it was wet or it was dry, but it was not my affair; and I suppose
that I sweltered about the strange city, with no sense of anything very
personal in the temperature, until nightfall. What I remember is being
high up in a hotel long since laid low, listening in the summer dark,
after the long day was done, to the Niagara roar of the omnibuses whose
tide then swept Broadway from curb to curb, for all the miles of its
length. At that hour the other city noises were stilled, or lost in this
vaster volume of sound, which seemed to fill the whole night. It had a
solemnity which the modern comer to New York will hardly imagine, for
that tide of omnibuses has long since ebbed away, and has left the air to
the strident discords of the elevated trains and the irregular alarum of
the grip-car gongs, which blend to no such harmonious thunder as rose
from the procession of those ponderous and innumerable vans. There was a
sort of inner quiet in the sound, and when I chose I slept off to it, and
woke to it in the morning refreshed and strengthened to explore the
literary situation in the metropolis.

I.

Not that I think I left this to the second day. Very probably I lost no
time in going to the office of the Saturday Press, as soon as I had my
breakfast after arriving, and I have a dim impression of anticipating the
earliest of the Bohemians, whose gay theory of life obliged them to a
good many hardships in lying down early in the morning, and rising up
late in the day. If it was the office-boy who bore me co