pses & confusions, as one reads Browning, remind me of
looking through a telescope (the small sort which you must move with
your hand, not clock-work). You toil across dark spaces which are
(to your lens) empty; but every now & then a splendor of stars &
suns bursts upon you and fills the whole field with flame. Feb.
23, 1887.

In another note he speaks of the "vague dim flash of splendid
hamming-birds through a fog." Whatever mental treasures he may or may
not have laid up from Browning there was assuredly a deep gratification
in the discovery of those splendors of "stars and suns" and the flashing
"humming-birds," as there must also have been in pointing out those
wonders to the little circle of devout listeners. It all seemed so worth
while.

It was at a time when George Meredith was a reigning literary favorite.
There was a Meredith cult as distinct as that of Browning. Possibly it
exists to-day, but, if so, it is less militant. Mrs. Clemens and her
associates were caught in the Meredith movement and read Diana of the
Crossways and the Egoist with reverential appreciation.

The Meredith epidemic did not touch Mark Twain. He read but few novels
at most, and, skilful as was the artistry of the English favorite, he
found his characters artificialities--ingeniously contrived puppets
rather than human beings, and, on the whole, overrated by their creator.
Diana of the Crossways was read aloud, and, listening now and then, he
was likely to say:

"It doesn't seem to me that Diana lives up to her reputation. The author
keeps telling us how smart she is, how brilliant, but I never seem to
hear her say anything smart or brilliant. Read me some of Diana's smart
utterances."

He was relentless enough in his criticism of a literature he did not care
for, and he never learned to care for Meredith.

He read his favorite books over and over with an ever-changing point of
view. He re-read Carlyle's French Revolution during the summer at the
farm, and to Howells he wrote:

How stunning are the changes which age makes in man while he sleeps!
When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871 I was a
Girondin; every time I have read it since I have read it
differently--being influenced & changed, little by little, by life &
environment (& Taine & St. Simon); & now I lay the book down once
more, & recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--And not a pale,
characterless Sansculotte, but