Letters Home. William Dean Howells

      You dear old fellow:

      You really mustn't print things from my letters, unless you want to take the frankness out of me. I can't write to all Wottoma as ingenuously as I write to you; I can understand your grief at having my good things wasted on you alone, hut I really can't let you share my bounty with the public. If the Day people were to ask me for New York letters, and were to offer me decent pay for them, that would be something to consider — and refuse; for I am going to devote myself to pure literature here, at least till I starve at it; and I can't let the Day have my impressions for nothing, or next to it.

      I wish I had put them down, as I felt them, from moment to moment since I arrived, but perhaps they will be full enough in my letters; of course you will keep my letters, and let me recover them as material for my epic, later on. New York gains in epicality every day, and the wonder is that I don't get familiar with it: I get more and more strange. The novelty of it is simply inexhaustible, and the drama of its tremendous being is past all saying. The other day, as I was walking up town after a cup of tea with the sumptuous America at her hotel, I struck into Broadway, and abandoned myself to the spectacle of the laborers digging the foundations for a skyscraper at one of the corners. They had scooped forty or fifty feet into the earth, below the cellars of the old houses they had torn down, and were drilling into the everlasting rock with steam drills. A whole hive of men were let loose all over the excavation, pitching the earth and broken stones into carts, lifting the carts by derricks to the level of the street, and hitching the horses to them, and working the big steam shovels hanging from the derricks, and the engines were snorting and chuckling and the wheels grinding, and the big horses straining and the men silently shouting at them, — the whole thing muted by the streaming feet of the multitude, and the whine of the trolleys, and the clatter of the wagons, and the crash and roar of the elevated trains; and pretty soon, a mud-covered Italian ran out of the depths with a red flag, and the rest ran to cover, and puff! went a blast that tore up tons of rock, and made no more of a dint in the great mass of noise than if it had been the jet of white vapor that it looked like. Life here is on such a prodigious scale, and it is going on in so many ways at once that the human atom loses the sense of its own little aches and pains, and merges its weakness in the strenuousness of the human mass.

      I suppose that is the reason why literature, as a New York interest, affects me less in New York than it did in Wottoma. I know here, as I knew there, that this is a literary center, and now and then I catch a glimpse of authorship in the flesh. But either because the other interests dwarf the literary interests, or because literature is essentially subjective, it is, so far, disappointingly invisible and intangible. Some of the young fellows dine at Lamarque's, and have a table to themselves in one comer, where they talk and smoke; but I don't know any of them yet, and I haven't quite the gall to make up to them. I suppose there must be literary houses where authors meet; but I have not begun to frequent them, and in my dearth of poets I try to make out with the poem which I find more and more in the personality of the divine America.

      In fact, I am seeing a good deal of the Ralsons, these days; or they are seeing a good deal of me. I seem to represent home and mother to Mrs. Ralson, and she claims part of every call I make at the Walhondia for a terribly long talk about Wottoma; though, as for calling, I am mostly there by invitation to all the meals of the day, including supper after the theatre or opera.

      America has set up a secretary for herself and a companion for her mother in the single person of a girl from western New York, somewhere, who does duty as a dragon when Ralson is away, or cannot be pressed into the service. She doesn't look like a dragon exactly; in fact, with her shyness and brownness of hair and dress, she makes me think of a quail and its dead-leaf plumage; and she has a way of slipping under cover which I think would not be finally inconsistent with an ability to peck. To tell the truth, as nearly as I can make out on such short notice, the secretary-companion and I were born doubtful of each other; though I Should be puzzled to say why. She seems, for reasons of her own, to look with a censorious eye upon America's frank friendliness for me as something very mistakenly bestowed. This naturally puts me on my most cynical behavior; I say nothing but heartless things in the secretary's presence; and if it goes on, I shall turn out a hardened worldling, and be marrying America for her' money before I know it. In view of this novel character, I do not understand how it is that the Mayor has not put me on the committee for the reception of Prince Henry. I think I could be guilty of a base servility that would satisfy the secretary's worst expectation. Toa must not, by the way, imagine that New York is as hysterical about the prince's visit as the newspapers make her appear. Journalism, my dear Lincoln, I do not mind confiding to you, now I have left it, is feminine; it likes to talk, and to hear itself talk, and it does not mind what the topic is: it can be as shrill and voluble about one thing as another. But I assure you that between the morning and the evening editions, there are long moments when we forget the prince altogether and