about, with my head full of Spenser and Shakespeare and "Gil Blas,"
looking for something in our own present day literature to which I could
surrender myself as to those five gripping old writings. And nothing
could I find until I took up "Life on the Mississippi," and "Huckleberry
Finn," and, just now, the "Connecticut Yankee." It isn't the first time
I have read any of these three, and it's because I know it won't be the
last, because these books are the only ones written in my lifetime that
claim my unreserved interest and admiration and, above all, my feelings,
that I've felt I had to write this letter.

I like to think that "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" will be looked
upon, fifty or a hundred years from now, as the picture of buoyant,
dramatic, human American life. I feel, deep in my own heart, pretty
sure that they will be. They won't be looked on then as the work of a
"humorist" any more than we think of Shakespeare as a humorist now.
I don't mean by this to set up a comparison between Mark Twain and
Shakespeare: I don't feel competent to do it; and I'm not at all sure
that it could be done until Mark Twain's work shall have its fair share
of historical perspective. But Shakespeare was a humorist and so, thank
Heaven! is Mark Twain. And Shakespeare plunged deep into the deep, sad
things of life; and so, in a different way (but in a way that has more
than once brought tears to my eyes) has Mark Twain. But after all,
it isn't because of any resemblance for anything that was ever before
written that Mark Twain's books strike in so deep: it's rather because
they've brought something really new into our literature--new, yet old
as Adam and Eve and the Apple. And this achievement, the achievement
of putting something into literature that was not there before, is, I
should think, the most that any writer can ever hope to do. It is the
one mark of distinction between the "lonesome" little group of big men
and the vast herd of medium and small ones. Anyhow, this much I am sure
of--to the young man who hopes, however feebly, to accomplish a little
something, someday, as a writer, the one inspiring example of our time
is Mark Twain. Very truly yours,
SAMUEL MERWIN.

Mark Twain once said he could live a month on a good compliment, and
from his reply, we may believe this one to belong in, that class.

*****

To Samuel Merwin, in Plainfield, N. J.: