ater, "but he came
rather near it. He sent for the proprietors, and they only laughed in
their jolly fashion, and said it was a robbery, but 'no matter, pay it.
It's all right.' The best men that ever owned a newspaper."--["My
Debut as a Literary Person."--Collected works.]--Though inferior to the
descriptive writing which a year later would give him a world-wide fame,
the Sandwich Island letters added greatly to his prestige on the
Pacific coast. They were convincing, informing; tersely--even
eloquently--descriptive, with a vein of humor adapted to their audience.
Yet to read them now, in the fine nonpareil type in which they were set,
is such a wearying task that one can only marvel at their popularity.
They were not brilliant literature, by our standards to-day. Their humor
is usually of a muscular kind, varied with grotesque exaggerations; the
literary quality is pretty attenuated. Here and there are attempts at
verse. He had a fashion in those days of combining two or more
poems with distracting, sometimes amusing, effect. Examples of these
dislocations occur in the Union letters; a single stanza will present
the general idea:

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,

The turf with their bayonets turning,
And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold,
And our lanterns dimly burning.

Only a trifling portion of the letters found their way into his Sandwich
Island chapters of 'Roughing It', five years later. They do, however,
reveal a sort of transition stage between the riotous florescence of the
Comstock and the mellowness of his later style. He was learning to
see things with better eyes, from a better point of view. It is not
difficult to believe that this literary change of heart was in no small
measure due to the influence of Anson Burlingame.

VOLUME I, Part 2: 1866-1875

LIV. THE LECTURER

It was not easy to take up the daily struggle again, but it was
necessary.--[Clemens once declared he had been so blue at this period
that one morning he put a loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked
courage to pull the trigger.]--Out of the ruck of possibilities (his
brain always thronged with plans) he constructed three or four resolves.
The chief of these was the trip around the world; but that lay months
ahead, and in the mean time ways and means must be provided. Another
intention was to finish the Hornet article, and forward it to Harper's
Magazine--a purpose c