Literary Friends and Acquaintance; a Personal Retrospect of American Authorship






ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS

   Absolute devotion to the day of her death,
   Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful
   Abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts
   Act officiously, not officially
   Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness
   Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution
   Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence
   Amuse him, even when they wronged him
   Amusingly realized the situation to their friends
   Anglo-American genius for ugliness
   Appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive
   Appeared to have no grudge left
   Backed their credulity with their credit
   Bayard Taylor: incomparable translation of Faust
   Became gratefully strange
   Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like
   But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month”
    Candle burning on the table for the cigars
   Celia Thaxter
   Charles Reade
   Charles F. Browne
   Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions
   Church: “Oh yes, I go It ‘most kills me, but I go,”
    Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature
   Cold-slaw
   Collective opacity
   Confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong
   Could make us feel that our faults were other people’s
   Could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it
   Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything
   Couldn’t fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer
   Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces
   Death of the joy that ought to come from work
   Death’s vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life
   Despair broke in laughter
   Despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology
   Did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced
   Dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two
   Discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise
   Dollars were of so much farther flight than now
   Edmund Quincy
   Edward Everett Hale
   Either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it
   Emerson
   Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself
   Espoused the theory of Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare
   Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense
   Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly
   Expectation of those who will come no more
   Express the appreciation of another’s fit word
   Feigned the gratitude which I could see that he expected
   Fell either below our pride or rose above our purse
   Felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault
   Few men last over from one reform to another
   First dinner served in courses that I had sat down to
   Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour
   Forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time
   Forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand
   Found life was not all poetry
   Francis Parkman
   Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years
   Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature
   George William Curtis
   Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life
   Give him your best wine
   Got out of it all the fun there was in it
   Greeting of great impersonal cordiality
   Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds
   Hard of hearing on one side. But it isn’t deafness
   Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy
   Hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love
   He was not bored because he would not be
   He did not care much for fiction
   He was not constructive; he was essentially observant
   He had no time to make money
   He was a youth to the end of his days
   He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection
   Heine
   Heroic lies
   His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event
   His readers trusted and loved him
   His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends
   His coming almost killed her, but it was worth it
   His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it
   Hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of life
   Honest men are few when it comes to themselves
   I find this young man worthy
   I believe neither in heroes nor in saints
   I did not know, and I hated to ask
   If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be
   If he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his
   In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal
   Incredible in their insipidity
   Industrial slavery
   Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there
   Intellectual poseurs
   It is well to hold one’s country to her promises
   It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say
   Jane Austen
   Julia Ward Howe
   Left him to do what the cat might
   Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm
   Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave
   Liked to find out good things and great things for himself
   Lincoln
   Literary dislikes or contempts
   Livy Clemens: nthe loveliest person I have ever seen
   Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel
   Longfellow
   Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it
   Love of freedom and the hope of justice
   Love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best
   Lowell
   Made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions
   Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave
   Man who had so much of the boy in him
   Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know
   Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other
   Memory will not be ruled
   Men who took themselves so seriously as that need
   Men’s lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women
   Met with kindness, if not honor
   Might so far forget myself as to be a novelist
   Mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world
   Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here
   Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew
   Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men
   Motley
   Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps
   Nearly nothing as chaos could be
   Never saw a man more regardful of negroes
   Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy
   Never paid in anything but hopes of paying
   No man ever yet told the truth about himself
   No time to make money
   No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery
   Not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality
   Not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds
   Not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy
   Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller
   Not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else
   Now death has come to join its vague conjectures
   NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less
   Odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission
   Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague
   Old man’s tendency to revert to the past
   Old man’s disposition to speak of his infirmities
   One could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame
   Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned
   Ought not to call coarse without calling one’s self prudish
   Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities
   Person who wished to talk when he could listen
   Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking
   Pointed the moral in all they did
   Polite learning hesitated his praise
   Praised it enough to satisfy the author
   Praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place
   Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it
   Quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it
   Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century
   Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous
   Remember the dinner-bell
   Reparation due from every white to every black man
   Secret of the man who is universally interesting
   Seen through the wrong end of the telescope
   Shackles of belief worn so long
   Shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be
   So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California
   Some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort
   Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon
   Sought the things that he could agree with you upon
   Spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity
   Standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them
   Stoddard
   Study in a corner by the porch
   Stupidly truthful
   The world is well lost whenever the world is wrong
   The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it
   Things common to all, however peculiar in each
   Thoreau
   Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best
   Times when a man’s city was a man’s country
   Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him
   True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself
   Truthful
   Turn of the talk toward the mystical
   Used to ingratitude from those he helped
   Vacuous vulgarity of its texts
   Visited one of the great mills
   Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal
   Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look
   We have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end
   Welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness
   Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you
   What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent
   When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast
   Whether every human motive was not selfish
   Whitman’s public use of his privately written praise
   Wit that tries its teeth upon everything
   Women’s rights
   Wonder why we hate the past so—“It’s so damned humiliating!”
    Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible
   Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity
   Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens






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