William Dean Howells 



and humane ; and could lose his poise 

 no more in the presence of the gro- 

 tesque than in the presence of the 

 beautiful. He felt, or so his literature 

 says to me, his unity with all men. 

 From some men, from most, he was 

 of course intellectually parted by im- 

 mense distances of culture, but essen- 

 tially he was the neighbor of mankind. 

 He knew the "world " of his time far 

 beyond all other American literary 

 men save one, but he was not awed 

 by it, or estranged by it from his fel- 

 low-beings outside of it. The greater 

 the pity, therefore, that he could not 

 have had the time or the will to write 

 the American novel which we are so 

 persistently expecting both of the fit 

 and the unfit ; but it is not essential 

 to his remembrance as an American 

 author that he should have done so. 

 He has brilliantly fixed forever a 

 phase of the Great West already van- 

 ished from actuality ; in one glowing 

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