William Dean Howells 



the chilly flowers, I had the sense of 

 his smiling presence, with a sort of 

 grief, which I shall not be able to ex- 

 plain, for the unfitness of the intense 

 cold of the day, and of the piercing 

 bleakness of the sunshine from which 

 we had escaped, and into which we 

 issued and suffered again when the 

 words were all said. I promised my- 

 self then to try sometime and say 

 about him the things that were in my 

 heart, but these " trivial fond records " 

 are not they, and I doubt if I could 

 ever get them out. They concern 

 what is deepest in me if not in him, 

 for they touch that old, great, high 

 affair of literature, and his own contri- 

 bution to the vocabulary of his race 

 and place. 



What he could do was proven in 

 the Mountaineering in the Sierra 

 Nevada papers, which will remain his 

 monument, and what he might fur- 

 ther have done is attested in that 

 153 



