b & I will
send some of the things back anyway if there is some that won't
keep.

CCXLVI

DUBLIN, CONTINUED

In time Mark Twain became very lonely in Dublin. After the brilliant
winter the contrast was too great. He was not yet ready for exile. In
one of his dictations he said:

The skies are enchantingly blue. The world is a dazzle of sunshine.
Monadnock is closer to us than usual by several hundred yards. The
vast extent of spreading valley is intensely green--the lakes as
intensely blue. And there is a new horizon, a remoter one than we
have known before, for beyond the mighty half-circle of hazy
mountains that form the usual frame of the picture rise certain
shadowy great domes that are unfamiliar to our eyes . . . .

But there is a defect--only one, but it is a defect which almost
entitles it to be spelled with a capital D. This is the defect of
loneliness. We have not a single neighbor who is a neighbor.
Nobody lives within two miles of us except Franklin MacVeagh, and he
is the farthest off of any, because he is in Europe . . . .

I feel for Adam and Eve now, for I know how it was with them. I am
existing, broken-hearted, in a Garden of Eden.... The Garden of
Eden I now know was an unendurable solitude. I know that the advent
of the serpent was a welcome change--anything for society . . . .

I never rose to the full appreciation of the utter solitude of this
place until a symbol of it--a compact and visible allegory of it
--furnished me the lacking lift three days ago. I was standing alone
on this veranda, in the late afternoon, mourning over the stillness,
the far-spreading, beautiful desolation, and the absence of visible
life, when a couple of shapely and graceful deer came sauntering
across the grounds and stopped, and at their leisure impudently
looked me over, as if they had an idea of buying me as bric-a-brac.
Then they seemed to conclude that they could do better for less
money elsewhere, and they sauntered indolently away and disappeared
among the trees. It sized up this solitude. It is so complete, so
perfect, that even the wild animals are satisfied with it. Those
dainty creatures were not in the least degree afraid of me.

This was no more than a mood--though real enough while it lasted--somber,
and in its way regal. It was the loneliness of a king--King Lear. Yet