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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of A Belated Guest, by W. D. Howells
+#38 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: A Belated Guest
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3391]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 04/01/01]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of A Belated Guest, by W. D. Howells
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+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--A Belated Guest
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+A BELATED GUEST
+
+It is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of things finds
+compensation in the privilege, however undisputed by his contemporaries,
+of recording his memories of it.  This is, in the first two or three
+instances, a pleasure.  It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by the
+fire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the past; and if the
+Absences thus entreated to become Presences are those of famous people,
+they lend to the fond historian a little of their lustre, in which he
+basks for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity.  But another
+time comes, and comes very soon, when the pensive pleasure changes to the
+pain of duty, and the precious privilege converts itself into a grievous
+obligation.  You are unable to choose your company among those immortal
+shades; if one, why not another, where all seem to have a right to such
+gleams of this 'dolce lome' as your reminiscences can shed upon them?
+Then they gather so rapidly, as the years pass, in these pale realms,
+that one, if one continues to survive, is in danger of wearing out such
+welcome, great or small, as met ones recollections in the first two or
+three instances, if one does one's duty by each.  People begin to say,
+and not without reason, in a world so hurried and wearied as this: "Ah,
+here he is again with his recollections!"  Well, but if the recollections
+by some magical good-fortune chance to concern such a contemporary of his
+as, say, Bret Harte, shall not he be partially justified, or at least
+excused?
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+My recollections of Bret Harte begin with the arrest, on the Atlantic
+shore, of that progress of his from the Pacific Slope, which, in the
+simple days of 1871, was like the progress of a prince, in the universal
+attention and interest which met and followed it.  He was indeed a
+prince, a fairy prince in whom every lover of his novel and enchanting
+art felt a patriotic property, for his promise and performance in those
+earliest tales of 'The Luck of Roaring Camp', and 'Tennessee's Partner',
+and 'Maggles', and 'The Outcasts of Poker Flat', were the earnests of an
+American literature to come.  If it is still to come, in great measure,
+that is not Harte's fault, for he kept on writing those stories, in one
+form or another, as long as he lived.  He wrote them first and last in
+the spirit of Dickens, which no man of his time could quite help doing,
+but he wrote them from the life of Bret Harte, on the soil and in the air
+of the newest kind of new world, and their freshness took the soul of his
+fellow-countrymen not only with joy, but with pride such as the
+Europeans, who adored him much longer, could never know in him.
+
+When the adventurous young editor who had proposed being his host for
+Cambridge and the Boston neighborhood, while Harte was still in San
+Francisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress eastward, read of
+the honors that attended his coming from point to point, his courage
+fell, as if he had perhaps, committed himself in too great an enterprise.
+Who was he, indeed, that he should think of making this
+
+               "Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,"
+
+his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed of
+attending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent a
+carriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco?
+Whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form,
+it must have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into
+Boston for him with the handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge
+afforded, and not trust to the horse-car and the local expressman to get
+him and his baggage out, as he would have done with a less portentous
+guest.  However it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the
+station, and Harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he
+were not even a fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were
+surely the most winning in the world.  He was then, as always, a child of
+extreme fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore
+in a mustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovial
+physiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its straight nose and
+fascinating thrust of the under lip, its fine eyes, and good forehead,
+then thickly crowned with the black hair which grew early white, while
+his mustache remained dark the most enviable and consoling effect
+possible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dying.
+He was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the first
+glance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first time
+could say to him, "Mr. Harte, aren't you afraid to go about in the cars
+so recklessly when there is this scare about smallpox?"  "No, madam," he
+could answer in that rich note of his, with an irony touched by pseudo-
+pathos, "I bear a charmed life."
+
+The drive out from Boston was not too long for getting on terms of
+personal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the two
+boys intensely interested in the novelties of a New England city and
+suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration of
+such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalk
+trees, and patches of park and lawn.  They found everything so fine, so
+refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California, where the natural
+forms were so vast that one could not get on companionable terms with
+them.  Their host heard them without misgiving for the world of romance
+which Harte had built up among those huge forms, and with a subtle
+perception that this was no excursion of theirs to the East, but a
+lifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they must
+always have felt California to be.  It is different now, when people are
+every day being born in California, and must begin to feel it home from
+the first breath, but it is notable that none of the Californians of that
+great early day have gone back to live amid the scenes which inspired and
+prospered them.
+
+Before they came in sight of the editor's humble roof he had mocked
+himself to his guest for his trepidations, and Harte with burlesque
+magnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something less
+formidable than he had loomed afar.  He accepted with joy the theory of
+passing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began as
+delightfully as it went on.  From first to last Cambridge amused him as
+much as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which was
+stranger to him even than the refined trees and grass.  It has already
+been told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited to
+him, he said, "why, you couldn't stand on your front porch and fire off
+your revolver without bringing down a two volumer," and no doubt the
+pleasure he had in it was the effect of its contrast with the wild
+California he had known, and perhaps, when he had not altogether known
+it, had invented.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which he
+could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the
+curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or
+his fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon.  Pretty presences in the tie-
+backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous
+poverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or
+incomings might give.  The chances were better with the outgoings than
+with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final
+result of his constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the
+homing pigeon's flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest
+eye.  It cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearly
+always late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going out
+to, and it needed the anxieties and energies of both families to get him
+into his clothes, and then into the carriage where a good deal of final
+buttoning must have been done, in order that he might not arrive so very
+late.  He was the only one concerned who was quite unconcerned; his
+patience with his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived at the expected
+houses smiling, serenely jovial, radiating a bland gaiety from his whole
+person, and ready to ignore any discomfort he might have occasioned.
+
+Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may be
+truly said that it was worth while to have him on any terms.  There never
+was a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest.
+
+It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost
+nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest
+word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the
+appreciation of another's fit word which goes far to establish for a man
+the character of boon humorist.  It must be said of him that if he took
+the honors easily that were paid him he took them modestly, and never by
+word or look invited them, or implied that he expected them.  It was fine
+to see him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientific
+sympathies from Agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing the
+incidents that "broke up the society upon the Stanislow."  It was a
+little fearsome to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike for
+something over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of 'The
+Cathedral.'  But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who
+could say the sort of things that Harte said to him of that delicious
+line picturing the bobolink as he
+
+          "Runs down a brook of laughter in the air."
+
+This, Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, and
+Lowell smoked well content with the praise.  Yet they were not men to get
+on easily together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Harte
+had none.  Afterward in London they did not meet often or willingly.
+Lowell owned the brilliancy and uncommonness of Harte's gift, while he
+sumptuously surfeited his passion of finding everybody more or less a Jew
+by finding that Harte was at least half a Jew on his father's side; he
+had long contended for the Hebraicism of his name.
+
+With all his appreciation of the literary eminences whom Fields used to
+class together as "the old saints," Harte had a spice of irreverence that
+enabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked, and
+to see the fun of a minor literary man's relation to them.  Emerson's
+smoking amused him, as a Jovian self-indulgence divinely out of character
+with so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how
+Emerson at Concord had proposed having a "wet night" with him over a
+glass of sherry, and had urged the scant wine upon his young friend with
+a hospitable gesture of his cigar.  But this was long after the Cambridge
+episode, in which Longfellow alone escaped the corrosive touch of his
+subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of
+his reverence.  That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity, of
+Longfellow's he honored with as much veneration as it was in him to
+bestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow's beautiful and perfected art
+which is almost a test of a critic's own fineness.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+As for Harte's talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the extreme of
+satire, but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things he
+admired.  He did not apparently care to hear himself praised, but he
+could very accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence in
+others.  He was at times a keen observer of nature and again not,
+apparently.  Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of
+his description of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and
+lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly
+shaking it; then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante's
+noticing how the dog's skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the
+exquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly.
+
+But once again, when an azalea was shown to him as the sort of bush that
+Sandy drunkenly slept under in 'The Idyl of Iced Gulch', he asked, "Why,
+is that an azalea?"  To be sure, this might have been less from his
+ignorance or indifference concerning the quality of the bush he had sent
+Sandy to sleep under than from his willingness to make a mock of an
+azalea in a very small pot, so disproportionate to uses which an azalea
+of Californian size could easily lend itself to.
+
+You never could be sure of Harte; he could only by chance be caught in
+earnest about anything or anybody.  Except for those slight recognitions
+of literary, traits in his talk with Lowell, nothing remained from his
+conversation but the general criticism he passed upon his brilliant
+fellow-Hebrew Heine, as "rather scorbutic."  He preferred to talk about
+the little matters of common incident and experience.  He amused himself
+with such things as the mystification of the postman of whom he asked his
+way to Phillips Avenue, where he adventurously supposed his host to be
+living.  "Why," the postman said, "there is no Phillips Avenue in
+Cambridge.  There's Phillips Place."  "Well," Harte assented, "Phillips
+Place will do; but there is a Phillips Avenue."  He entered eagerly into
+the canvass of the distinctions and celebrities asked to meet him at the
+reception made for him, but he had even a greater pleasure in
+compassionating his host for the vast disparity between the caterer's
+china and plated ware and the simplicities and humilities of the home of
+virtuous poverty; and he spluttered with delight at the sight of the
+lofty 'epergnes' set up and down the supper-table when he was brought in
+to note the preparations made in his honor.  Those monumental structures
+were an inexhaustible joy to him; he walked round and round the room, and
+viewed them in different perspectives, so as to get the full effect of
+the towering forms that dwarfed it so.
+
+He was a tease, as many a sweet and fine wit is apt to be, but his
+teasing was of the quality of a caress, so much kindness went with it.
+He lamented as an irreparable loss his having missed seeing that night an
+absent-minded brother in literature, who came in rubber shoes, and
+forgetfully wore them throughout the evening.  That hospitable soul of
+Ralph Keeler, who had known him in California, but had trembled for their
+acquaintance when he read of all the honors that might well have spoiled
+Harte for the friends of his simpler days, rejoiced in the unchanged
+cordiality of his nature when they met, and presently gave him one of
+those restaurant lunches in Boston, which he was always sumptuously
+providing out of his destitution.  Harte was the life of a time which was
+perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul.  The truth is, there
+was nothing but careless stories carelessly told, and jokes and laughing,
+and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlike
+the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be; but there was present
+one who met with that pleasant Boston company for the first time, and to
+whom Harte attributed a superstition of Boston seriousness not realized
+then and there.  "Look at him," he said, from time to time.  "This is the
+dream of his life," and then shouted and choked with fun at the
+difference between the occasion and the expectation he would have
+imagined in his commensal's mind.  At a dinner long after in London,
+where several of the commensals of that time met again, with other
+literary friends of a like age and stature, Harte laid his arms well
+along their shoulders as they formed in a half-circle before him, and
+screamed out in mocking mirth at the bulbous favor to which the slim
+shapes of the earlier date had come.  The sight was not less a rapture to
+him that he was himself the prey of the same practical joke from the
+passing years.  The hair which the years had wholly swept from some of
+those thoughtful brows, or left spindling autumnal spears, "or few or
+none," to "shake against the cold," had whitened to a wintry snow on his,
+while his mustache had kept its youthful black.  "He looks," one of his
+friends said to another as they walked home together, "like a French
+marquis of the ancien regime."  "Yes," the other assented, thoughtfully,
+"or like an American actor made up for the part."
+
+The saying closely fitted the outward fact, but was of a subtle injustice
+in its implication of anything histrionic in Harte's nature.  Never was
+any man less a 'poseur'; he made simply and helplessly known what he was
+at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in
+enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself.  In the
+course of events, which were in his case so very human, it came about on
+a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to
+right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given,
+and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where
+Harte dined, and in the anteroom at the lecture-hall, and on the
+platform, where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and
+untroubled charm.  He was indeed the only one privy to the law's presence
+who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier
+time ventured to suggest, "Well, Harte, this is the old literary
+tradition; this is the Fleet business over again," he joyously smote his
+thigh and crowed out, "Yes, the Fleet!"  No doubt he tasted all the
+delicate humor of the situation, and his pleasure in it was quite
+unaffected.
+
+If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh conditions of the elder
+American world, it might very well be that his temperament was not
+altogether in the wrong.  If it disabled him for certain experiences of
+life, it was the source of what was most delightful in his personality,
+and perhaps most beautiful in his talent.  It enabled him to do such
+things as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did not
+do, and indeed could not.  His talent was not a facile gift; he owned
+that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that
+yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in
+that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a
+line.  It may be owned for him that though he came to the East at thirty-
+four, which ought to have been the very prime of his powers, he seemed to
+have arrived after the age of observation was past for him.  He saw
+nothing aright, either in Newport, where he went to live, or in New York,
+where he sojourned, or on those lecturing tours which took him about the
+whole country; or if he saw it aright, he could not report it aright, or
+would not.  After repeated and almost invariable failures to deal with
+the novel characters and circumstances which he encountered he left off
+trying, and frankly went back to the semi-mythical California he had half
+discovered, half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over as long as
+he lived.  This, whether he did it from instinct or from reason, was the
+best thing he could do, and it went as nearly as might be to satisfy the
+insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer to be found on
+our map.
+
+It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament defended him from any
+bitterness in the disappointment he may have shared with that simple
+American public which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any and
+everything of him in fiction and drama.  The long breath was not his; he
+could not write a novel, though he produced the like of one or two, and
+his plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it.  At any
+rate, they could not keep it, even when they got it, and they denoted the
+fatigue or the indifference of their author in being dramatizations of
+his longer or shorter fictions, and not originally dramatic efforts.
+The direction in which his originality lasted longest, and most
+strikingly affirmed his power, was in the direction of his verse.
+
+Whatever minds there may be about Harte's fiction finally, there can
+hardly be more than one mind about his poetry.  He was indeed a poet;
+whether he wrote what drolly called itself "dialect," or wrote language,
+he was a poet of a fine and fresh touch.  It must be allowed him that in
+prose as well he had the inventive gift, but he had it in verse far more
+importantly.  There are lines, phrases, turns in his poems,
+characterizations, and pictures which will remain as enduringly as
+anything American, if that is not saying altogether too little for them.
+In poetry he rose to all the occasions he made for himself, though he
+could not rise to the occasions made for him, and so far failed in the
+demands he acceded to for a Phi Beta Kappa poem, as to come to that
+august Harvard occasion with a jingle so trivial, so out of keeping, so
+inadequate that his enemies, if he ever truly had any, must have suffered
+from it almost as much as his friends.  He himself did not suffer from
+his failure, from having read before the most elect assembly of the
+country a poem which would hardly have served the careless needs of an
+informal dinner after the speaking had begun; he took the whole
+disastrous business lightly, gayly, leniently, kindly, as that golden
+temperament of his enabled him to take all the good or bad of life.
+
+The first year of his Eastern sojourn was salaried in a sum which took
+the souls of all his young contemporaries with wonder, if no baser
+passion, in the days when dollars were of so much farther flight than
+now, but its net result in a literary return to his publishers was one
+story and two or three poems.  They had not profited much by his book,
+which, it will doubtless amaze a time of fifty thousand editions selling
+before their publication, to learn had sold only thirty-five hundred in
+the sixth month of its career, as Harte himself,
+
+          "With sick and scornful looks averse,"
+
+confided to his Cambridge host after his first interview with the Boston
+counting-room.  It was the volume which contained "The Luck of Roaring
+Camp," and the other early tales which made him a continental, and then
+an all but a world-wide fame.  Stories that had been talked over, and
+laughed over, and cried over all up and down the land, that had been
+received with acclaim by criticism almost as boisterous as their
+popularity, and recognized as the promise of greater things than any done
+before in their kind, came to no more than this pitiful figure over the
+booksellers' counters.  It argued much for the publishers that in spite
+of this stupefying result they were willing, they were eager, to pay him
+ten thousand dollars for whatever, however much or little, he chose to
+write in a year: Their offer was made in Boston, after some offers
+mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague, had been made in New
+York.
+
+It was not his fault that their venture proved of such slight return in
+literary material.  Harte was in the midst of new and alien conditions, -
+-[See a corollary in M. Froude who visited the U.S. for a few months and
+then published a comprehensive analysis of the nation and its people.
+Twain's rebuttal (Mr. Froude's Progress) would have been 'a propos' for
+Harte in Cambridge.  D.W.]-- and he had always his temperament against
+him, as well as the reluctant if not the niggard nature of his muse.  He
+would no doubt have been only too glad to do more than he did for the
+money, but actually if not literally he could not do more.  When it came
+to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and be
+became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself
+nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed.  He was of the order
+of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey, and Sterne and Steele, in
+his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner
+world he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens.  There was
+nothing of his easy-going hilarity in that world; there he was of a
+Puritanic severity, and of a conscience that forgave him no pang.  Other
+California writers have testified to the fidelity with which he did his
+work as editor.  He made himself not merely the arbiter but the
+inspiration of his contributors, and in a region where literature had
+hardly yet replaced the wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he made
+the sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose, and created a
+literary periodical of the first class on the borders of civilization.
+
+It is useless to wonder now what would have been his future if the
+publisher of the Overland Monthly had been of imagination or capital
+enough to meet the demand which Harte dimly intimated to his Cambridge
+host as the condition of his remaining in California.  Publishers, men
+with sufficient capital, are of a greatly varying gift in the regions of
+prophecy, and he of the Overland Monthly was not to be blamed if he could
+not foresee his account in paying Harte ten thousand a year to continue
+editing the magazine.  He did according to his lights, and Harte came to
+the East, and then went to England, where his last twenty-five years were
+passed in cultivating the wild plant of his Pacific Slope discovery.  It
+was always the same plant, leaf and flower and fruit, but it perennially
+pleased the constant English world, and thence the European world, though
+it presently failed of much delighting these fastidious States.  Probably
+he would have done something else if he could; he did not keep on doing
+the wild mining-camp thing because it was the easiest, but because it was
+for him the only possible thing.  Very likely he might have preferred not
+doing anything.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The joyous visit of a week, which has been here so poorly recovered from
+the past, came to an end, and the host went with his guest to the station
+in as much vehicular magnificence as had marked his going to meet him
+there.  Harte was no longer the alarming portent of the earlier time, but
+an experience of unalloyed delight.  You must love a person whose worst
+trouble-giving was made somehow a favor by his own unconsciousness of the
+trouble, and it was a most flattering triumph to have got him in time, or
+only a little late, to so many luncheons and dinners.  If only now he
+could be got to the train in time the victory would be complete, the
+happiness of the visit without a flaw.  Success seemed to crown the
+fondest hope in this respect.  The train had not yet left the station;
+there stood the parlor-car which Harte had seats in; and he was followed
+aboard for those last words in which people try to linger out pleasures
+they have known together.  In this case the sweetest of the pleasures had
+been sitting up late after those dinners, and talking them over, and then
+degenerating from that talk into the mere giggle and making giggle which
+Charles Lamb found the best thing in life.  It had come to this as the
+host and guest sat together for those parting moments, when Harte
+suddenly started up in the discovery of having forgotten to get some
+cigars.  They rushed out of the train together, and after a wild descent
+upon the cigar-counter of the restaurant, Harte rushed back to his car.
+But by this time the train was already moving with that deceitful
+slowness of the departing train, and Harte had to clamber up the steps of
+the rearmost platform.  His host clambered after, to make sure that he
+was aboard, which done, he dropped to the ground, while Harte drew out of
+the station, blandly smiling, and waving his hand with a cigar in it, in
+picturesque farewell from the platform.
+
+Then his host realized that he had dropped to the ground barely in time
+to escape being crushed against the side of the archway that sharply
+descended beside the steps of the train, and he went and sat down in that
+handsomest hack, and was for a moment deathly sick at the danger that had
+not realized itself to him in season.  To be sure, he was able, long
+after, to adapt the incident to the exigencies of fiction, and to have a
+character, not otherwise to be conveniently disposed of, actually crushed
+to death between a moving train and such an archway.
+
+Besides, he had then and always afterward, the immense super-compensation
+of the memories of that visit from one of the most charming personalities
+in the world,
+
+          "In life's morning march when his bosom was young,"
+
+and when infinitely less would have sated him.  Now death has come to
+join its vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life, and that
+blithe spirit is elsewhere.  But nothing can take from him who remains
+the witchery of that most winning presence.  Still it looks smiling from
+the platform of the car, and casts a farewell of mock heartbreak from it.
+Still a gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years that are now
+numbered, and out of somewhere the hearer's sense is rapt with the mellow
+cordial of a voice that was like no other.
+
+[This last paragraph reminds one again that, as with Holmes, a great poet
+writes the best prose.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution. . . . . . . . . . .
+Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything . . . . . . . .
+Couldn't fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer  . . . . 
+Death's vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life . . . . . .
+Dollars were of so much farther flight than now. . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself . . . . . .
+Express the appreciation of another's fit word . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life . . . . . . . . .
+His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends . . . . . . .
+His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it. . . . . .
+Iinsatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there . . . . .
+Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel. . . . . . . . . . .
+Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller . . . . . . .
+Now death has come to join its vague conjectures . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague . . . . . . . . .
+Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California. . . . . . . . .
+Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of A Belated Guest, by W. D. Howells
+by William Dean Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of A Belated Guest, by Howells
+#38 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: A Belated Guest
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+Author: William Dean Howells
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+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3391]
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+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--A Belated Guest
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+A BELATED GUEST
+
+It is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of things finds
+compensation in the privilege, however undisputed by his contemporaries,
+of recording his memories of it.  This is, in the first two or three
+instances, a pleasure.  It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by the
+fire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the past; and if the
+Absences thus entreated to become Presences are those of famous people,
+they lend to the fond historian a little of their lustre, in which he
+basks for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity.  But another
+time comes, and comes very soon, when the pensive pleasure changes to the
+pain of duty, and the precious privilege converts itself into a grievous
+obligation.  You are unable to choose your company among those immortal
+shades; if one, why not another, where all seem to have a right to such
+gleams of this 'dolce lome' as your reminiscences can shed upon them?
+Then they gather so rapidly, as the years pass, in these pale realms,
+that one, if one continues to survive, is in danger of wearing out such
+welcome, great or small, as met ones recollections in the first two or
+three instances, if one does one's duty by each.  People begin to say,
+and not without reason, in a world so hurried and wearied as this: "Ah,
+here he is again with his recollections!"  Well, but if the recollections
+by some magical good-fortune chance to concern such a contemporary of his
+as, say, Bret Harte, shall not he be partially justified, or at least
+excused?
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+My recollections of Bret Harte begin with the arrest, on the Atlantic
+shore, of that progress of his from the Pacific Slope, which, in the
+simple days of 1871, was like the progress of a prince, in the universal
+attention and interest which met and followed it.  He was indeed a
+prince, a fairy prince in whom every lover of his novel and enchanting
+art felt a patriotic property, for his promise and performance in those
+earliest tales of 'The Luck of Roaring Camp', and 'Tennessee's Partner',
+and 'Maggles', and 'The Outcasts of Poker Flat', were the earnests of an
+American literature to come.  If it is still to come, in great measure,
+that is not Harte's fault, for he kept on writing those stories, in one
+form or another, as long as he lived.  He wrote them first and last in
+the spirit of Dickens, which no man of his time could quite help doing,
+but he wrote them from the life of Bret Harte, on the soil and in the air
+of the newest kind of new world, and their freshness took the soul of his
+fellow-countrymen not only with joy, but with pride such as the
+Europeans, who adored him much longer, could never know in him.
+
+When the adventurous young editor who had proposed being his host for
+Cambridge and the Boston neighborhood, while Harte was still in San
+Francisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress eastward, read of
+the honors that attended his coming from point to point, his courage
+fell, as if he had perhaps, committed himself in too great an enterprise.
+Who was he, indeed, that he should think of making this
+
+               "Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,"
+
+his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed of
+attending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent a
+carriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco?
+Whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form,
+it must have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into
+Boston for him with the handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge
+afforded, and not trust to the horse-car and the local expressman to get
+him and his baggage out, as he would have done with a less portentous
+guest.  However it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the
+station, and Harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he
+were not even a fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were
+surely the most winning in the world.  He was then, as always, a child of
+extreme fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore
+in a mustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovial
+physiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its straight nose and
+fascinating thrust of the under lip, its fine eyes, and good forehead,
+then thickly crowned with the black hair which grew early white, while
+his mustache remained dark the most enviable and consoling effect
+possible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dying.
+He was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the first
+glance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first time
+could say to him, "Mr. Harte, aren't you afraid to go about in the cars
+so recklessly when there is this scare about smallpox?"  "No, madam," he
+could answer in that rich note of his, with an irony touched by pseudo-
+pathos, "I bear a charmed life."
+
+The drive out from Boston was not too long for getting on terms of
+personal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the two
+boys intensely interested in the novelties of a New England city and
+suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration of
+such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalk
+trees, and patches of park and lawn.  They found everything so fine, so
+refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California, where the natural
+forms were so vast that one could not get on companionable terms with
+them.  Their host heard them without misgiving for the world of romance
+which Harte had built up among those huge forms, and with a subtle
+perception that this was no excursion of theirs to the East, but a
+lifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they must
+always have felt California to be.  It is different now, when people are
+every day being born in California, and must begin to feel it home from
+the first breath, but it is notable that none of the Californians of that
+great early day have gone back to live amid the scenes which inspired and
+prospered them.
+
+Before they came in sight of the editor's humble roof he had mocked
+himself to his guest for his trepidations, and Harte with burlesque
+magnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something less
+formidable than he had loomed afar.  He accepted with joy the theory of
+passing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began as
+delightfully as it went on.  From first to last Cambridge amused him as
+much as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which was
+stranger to him even than the refined trees and grass.  It has already
+been told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited to
+him, he said, "why, you couldn't stand on your front porch and fire off
+your revolver without bringing down a two volumer," and no doubt the
+pleasure he had in it was the effect of its contrast with the wild
+California he had known, and perhaps, when he had not altogether known
+it, had invented.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which he
+could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the
+curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or
+his fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon.  Pretty presences in the tie-
+backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous
+poverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or
+incomings might give.  The chances were better with the outgoings than
+with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final
+result of his constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the
+homing pigeon's flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest
+eye.  It cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearly
+always late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going out
+to, and it needed the anxieties and energies of both families to get him
+into his clothes, and then into the carriage where a good deal of final
+buttoning must have been done, in order that he might not arrive so very
+late.  He was the only one concerned who was quite unconcerned; his
+patience with his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived at the expected
+houses smiling, serenely jovial, radiating a bland gaiety from his whole
+person, and ready to ignore any discomfort he might have occasioned.
+
+Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may be
+truly said that it was worth while to have him on any terms.  There never
+was a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest.
+
+It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost
+nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest
+word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the
+appreciation of another's fit word which goes far to establish for a man
+the character of boon humorist.  It must be said of him that if he took
+the honors easily that were paid him he took them modestly, and never by
+word or look invited them, or implied that he expected them.  It was fine
+to see him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientific
+sympathies from Agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing the
+incidents that "broke up the society upon the Stanislow."  It was a
+little fearsome to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike for
+something over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of 'The
+Cathedral.'  But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who
+could say the sort of things that Harte said to him of that delicious
+line picturing the bobolink as he
+
+          "Runs down a brook of laughter in the air."
+
+This, Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, and
+Lowell smoked well content with the praise.  Yet they were not men to get
+on easily together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Harte
+had none.  Afterward in London they did not meet often or willingly.
+Lowell owned the brilliancy and uncommonness of Harte's gift, while he
+sumptuously surfeited his passion of finding everybody more or less a Jew
+by finding that Harte was at least half a Jew on his father's side; he
+had long contended for the Hebraicism of his name.
+
+With all his appreciation of the literary eminences whom Fields used to
+class together as "the old saints," Harte had a spice of irreverence that
+enabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked, and
+to see the fun of a minor literary man's relation to them.  Emerson's
+smoking amused him, as a Jovian self-indulgence divinely out of character
+with so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how
+Emerson at Concord had proposed having a "wet night" with him over a
+glass of sherry, and had urged the scant wine upon his young friend with
+a hospitable gesture of his cigar.  But this was long after the Cambridge
+episode, in which Longfellow alone escaped the corrosive touch of his
+subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of
+his reverence.  That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity, of
+Longfellow's he honored with as much veneration as it was in him to
+bestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow's beautiful and perfected art
+which is almost a test of a critic's own fineness.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+As for Harte's talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the extreme of
+satire, but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things he
+admired.  He did not apparently care to hear himself praised, but he
+could very accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence in
+others.  He was at times a keen observer of nature and again not,
+apparently.  Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of
+his description of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and
+lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly
+shaking it; then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante's
+noticing how the dog's skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the
+exquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly.
+
+But once again, when an azalea was shown to him as the sort of bush that
+Sandy drunkenly slept under in 'The Idyl of Iced Gulch', he asked, "Why,
+is that an azalea?"  To be sure, this might have been less from his
+ignorance or indifference concerning the quality of the bush he had sent
+Sandy to sleep under than from his willingness to make a mock of an
+azalea in a very small pot, so disproportionate to uses which an azalea
+of Californian size could easily lend itself to.
+
+You never could be sure of Harte; he could only by chance be caught in
+earnest about anything or anybody.  Except for those slight recognitions
+of literary, traits in his talk with Lowell, nothing remained from his
+conversation but the general criticism he passed upon his brilliant
+fellow-Hebrew Heine, as "rather scorbutic."  He preferred to talk about
+the little matters of common incident and experience.  He amused himself
+with such things as the mystification of the postman of whom he asked his
+way to Phillips Avenue, where he adventurously supposed his host to be
+living.  "Why," the postman said, "there is no Phillips Avenue in
+Cambridge.  There's Phillips Place."  "Well," Harte assented, "Phillips
+Place will do; but there is a Phillips Avenue."  He entered eagerly into
+the canvass of the distinctions and celebrities asked to meet him at the
+reception made for him, but he had even a greater pleasure in
+compassionating his host for the vast disparity between the caterer's
+china and plated ware and the simplicities and humilities of the home of
+virtuous poverty; and he spluttered with delight at the sight of the
+lofty 'epergnes' set up and down the supper-table when he was brought in
+to note the preparations made in his honor.  Those monumental structures
+were an inexhaustible joy to him; he walked round and round the room, and
+viewed them in different perspectives, so as to get the full effect of
+the towering forms that dwarfed it so.
+
+He was a tease, as many a sweet and fine wit is apt to be, but his
+teasing was of the quality of a caress, so much kindness went with it.
+He lamented as an irreparable loss his having missed seeing that night an
+absent-minded brother in literature, who came in rubber shoes, and
+forgetfully wore them throughout the evening.  That hospitable soul of
+Ralph Keeler, who had known him in California, but had trembled for their
+acquaintance when he read of all the honors that might well have spoiled
+Harte for the friends of his simpler days, rejoiced in the unchanged
+cordiality of his nature when they met, and presently gave him one of
+those restaurant lunches in Boston, which he was always sumptuously
+providing out of his destitution.  Harte was the life of a time which was
+perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul.  The truth is, there
+was nothing but careless stories carelessly told, and jokes and laughing,
+and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlike
+the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be; but there was present
+one who met with that pleasant Boston company for the first time, and to
+whom Harte attributed a superstition of Boston seriousness not realized
+then and there.  "Look at him," he said, from time to time.  "This is the
+dream of his life," and then shouted and choked with fun at the
+difference between the occasion and the expectation he would have
+imagined in his commensal's mind.  At a dinner long after in London,
+where several of the commensals of that time met again, with other
+literary friends of a like age and stature, Harte laid his arms well
+along their shoulders as they formed in a half-circle before him, and
+screamed out in mocking mirth at the bulbous favor to which the slim
+shapes of the earlier date had come.  The sight was not less a rapture to
+him that he was himself the prey of the same practical joke from the
+passing years.  The hair which the years had wholly swept from some of
+those thoughtful brows, or left spindling autumnal spears, "or few or
+none," to "shake against the cold," had whitened to a wintry snow on his,
+while his mustache had kept its youthful black.  "He looks," one of his
+friends said to another as they walked home together, "like a French
+marquis of the ancien regime."  "Yes," the other assented, thoughtfully,
+"or like an American actor made up for the part."
+
+The saying closely fitted the outward fact, but was of a subtle injustice
+in its implication of anything histrionic in Harte's nature.  Never was
+any man less a 'poseur'; he made simply and helplessly known what he was
+at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in
+enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself.  In the
+course of events, which were in his case so very human, it came about on
+a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to
+right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given,
+and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where
+Harte dined, and in the anteroom at the lecture-hall, and on the
+platform, where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and
+untroubled charm.  He was indeed the only one privy to the law's presence
+who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier
+time ventured to suggest, "Well, Harte, this is the old literary
+tradition; this is the Fleet business over again," he joyously smote his
+thigh and crowed out, "Yes, the Fleet!"  No doubt he tasted all the
+delicate humor of the situation, and his pleasure in it was quite
+unaffected.
+
+If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh conditions of the elder
+American world, it might very well be that his temperament was not
+altogether in the wrong.  If it disabled him for certain experiences of
+life, it was the source of what was most delightful in his personality,
+and perhaps most beautiful in his talent.  It enabled him to do such
+things as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did not
+do, and indeed could not.  His talent was not a facile gift; he owned
+that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that
+yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in
+that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a
+line.  It may be owned for him that though he came to the East at thirty-
+four, which ought to have been the very prime of his powers, he seemed to
+have arrived after the age of observation was past for him.  He saw
+nothing aright, either in Newport, where he went to live, or in New York,
+where he sojourned, or on those lecturing tours which took him about the
+whole country; or if he saw it aright, he could not report it aright, or
+would not.  After repeated and almost invariable failures to deal with
+the novel characters and circumstances which he encountered he left off
+trying, and frankly went back to the semi-mythical California he had half
+discovered, half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over as long as
+he lived.  This, whether he did it from instinct or from reason, was the
+best thing he could do, and it went as nearly as might be to satisfy the
+insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer to be found on
+our map.
+
+It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament defended him from any
+bitterness in the disappointment he may have shared with that simple
+American public which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any and
+everything of him in fiction and drama.  The long breath was not his; he
+could not write a novel, though he produced the like of one or two, and
+his plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it.  At any
+rate, they could not keep it, even when they got it, and they denoted the
+fatigue or the indifference of their author in being dramatizations of
+his longer or shorter fictions, and not originally dramatic efforts.
+The direction in which his originality lasted longest, and most
+strikingly affirmed his power, was in the direction of his verse.
+
+Whatever minds there may be about Harte's fiction finally, there can
+hardly be more than one mind about his poetry.  He was indeed a poet;
+whether he wrote what drolly called itself "dialect," or wrote language,
+he was a poet of a fine and fresh touch.  It must be allowed him that in
+prose as well he had the inventive gift, but he had it in verse far more
+importantly.  There are lines, phrases, turns in his poems,
+characterizations, and pictures which will remain as enduringly as
+anything American, if that is not saying altogether too little for them.
+In poetry he rose to all the occasions he made for himself, though he
+could not rise to the occasions made for him, and so far failed in the
+demands he acceded to for a Phi Beta Kappa poem, as to come to that
+august Harvard occasion with a jingle so trivial, so out of keeping, so
+inadequate that his enemies, if he ever truly had any, must have suffered
+from it almost as much as his friends.  He himself did not suffer from
+his failure, from having read before the most elect assembly of the
+country a poem which would hardly have served the careless needs of an
+informal dinner after the speaking had begun; he took the whole
+disastrous business lightly, gayly, leniently, kindly, as that golden
+temperament of his enabled him to take all the good or bad of life.
+
+The first year of his Eastern sojourn was salaried in a sum which took
+the souls of all his young contemporaries with wonder, if no baser
+passion, in the days when dollars were of so much farther flight than
+now, but its net result in a literary return to his publishers was one
+story and two or three poems.  They had not profited much by his book,
+which, it will doubtless amaze a time of fifty thousand editions selling
+before their publication, to learn had sold only thirty-five hundred in
+the sixth month of its career, as Harte himself,
+
+          "With sick and scornful looks averse,"
+
+confided to his Cambridge host after his first interview with the Boston
+counting-room.  It was the volume which contained "The Luck of Roaring
+Camp," and the other early tales which made him a continental, and then
+an all but a world-wide fame.  Stories that had been talked over, and
+laughed over, and cried over all up and down the land, that had been
+received with acclaim by criticism almost as boisterous as their
+popularity, and recognized as the promise of greater things than any done
+before in their kind, came to no more than this pitiful figure over the
+booksellers' counters.  It argued much for the publishers that in spite
+of this stupefying result they were willing, they were eager, to pay him
+ten thousand dollars for whatever, however much or little, he chose to
+write in a year: Their offer was made in Boston, after some offers
+mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague, had been made in New
+York.
+
+It was not his fault that their venture proved of such slight return in
+literary material.  Harte was in the midst of new and alien conditions,
+--[See a corollary in M. Froude who visited the U.S. for a few months and
+then published a comprehensive analysis of the nation and its people.
+Twain's rebuttal (Mr. Froude's Progress) would have been 'a propos' for
+Harte in Cambridge.  D.W.]--and he had always his temperament against
+him, as well as the reluctant if not the niggard nature of his muse.  He
+would no doubt have been only too glad to do more than he did for the
+money, but actually if not literally he could not do more.  When it came
+to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and be
+became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself
+nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed.  He was of the order
+of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey, and Sterne and Steele, in
+his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner
+world he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens.  There was
+nothing of his easy-going hilarity in that world; there he was of a
+Puritanic severity, and of a conscience that forgave him no pang.  Other
+California writers have testified to the fidelity with which he did his
+work as editor.  He made himself not merely the arbiter but the
+inspiration of his contributors, and in a region where literature had
+hardly yet replaced the wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he made
+the sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose, and created a
+literary periodical of the first class on the borders of civilization.
+
+It is useless to wonder now what would have been his future if the
+publisher of the Overland Monthly had been of imagination or capital
+enough to meet the demand which Harte dimly intimated to his Cambridge
+host as the condition of his remaining in California.  Publishers, men
+with sufficient capital, are of a greatly varying gift in the regions of
+prophecy, and he of the Overland Monthly was not to be blamed if he could
+not foresee his account in paying Harte ten thousand a year to continue
+editing the magazine.  He did according to his lights, and Harte came to
+the East, and then went to England, where his last twenty-five years were
+passed in cultivating the wild plant of his Pacific Slope discovery.  It
+was always the same plant, leaf and flower and fruit, but it perennially
+pleased the constant English world, and thence the European world, though
+it presently failed of much delighting these fastidious States.  Probably
+he would have done something else if he could; he did not keep on doing
+the wild mining-camp thing because it was the easiest, but because it was
+for him the only possible thing.  Very likely he might have preferred not
+doing anything.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The joyous visit of a week, which has been here so poorly recovered from
+the past, came to an end, and the host went with his guest to the station
+in as much vehicular magnificence as had marked his going to meet him
+there.  Harte was no longer the alarming portent of the earlier time, but
+an experience of unalloyed delight.  You must love a person whose worst
+trouble-giving was made somehow a favor by his own unconsciousness of the
+trouble, and it was a most flattering triumph to have got him in time, or
+only a little late, to so many luncheons and dinners.  If only now he
+could be got to the train in time the victory would be complete, the
+happiness of the visit without a flaw.  Success seemed to crown the
+fondest hope in this respect.  The train had not yet left the station;
+there stood the parlor-car which Harte had seats in; and he was followed
+aboard for those last words in which people try to linger out pleasures
+they have known together.  In this case the sweetest of the pleasures had
+been sitting up late after those dinners, and talking them over, and then
+degenerating from that talk into the mere giggle and making giggle which
+Charles Lamb found the best thing in life.  It had come to this as the
+host and guest sat together for those parting moments, when Harte
+suddenly started up in the discovery of having forgotten to get some
+cigars.  They rushed out of the train together, and after a wild descent
+upon the cigar-counter of the restaurant, Harte rushed back to his car.
+But by this time the train was already moving with that deceitful
+slowness of the departing train, and Harte had to clamber up the steps of
+the rearmost platform.  His host clambered after, to make sure that he
+was aboard, which done, he dropped to the ground, while Harte drew out of
+the station, blandly smiling, and waving his hand with a cigar in it, in
+picturesque farewell from the platform.
+
+Then his host realized that he had dropped to the ground barely in time
+to escape being crushed against the side of the archway that sharply
+descended beside the steps of the train, and he went and sat down in that
+handsomest hack, and was for a moment deathly sick at the danger that had
+not realized itself to him in season.  To be sure, he was able, long
+after, to adapt the incident to the exigencies of fiction, and to have a
+character, not otherwise to be conveniently disposed of, actually crushed
+to death between a moving train and such an archway.
+
+Besides, he had then and always afterward, the immense super-compensation
+of the memories of that visit from one of the most charming personalities
+in the world,
+
+          "In life's morning march when his bosom was young,"
+
+and when infinitely less would have sated him.  Now death has come to
+join its vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life, and that
+blithe spirit is elsewhere.  But nothing can take from him who remains
+the witchery of that most winning presence.  Still it looks smiling from
+the platform of the car, and casts a farewell of mock heartbreak from it.
+Still a gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years that are now
+numbered, and out of somewhere the hearer's sense is rapt with the mellow
+cordial of a voice that was like no other.
+
+[This last paragraph reminds one again that, as with Holmes: a great poet
+writes the best prose.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution
+Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything
+Couldn't fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer
+Death's vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life
+Dollars were of so much farther flight than now
+Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself
+Express the appreciation of another's fit word
+Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years
+Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life
+His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends
+His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it
+Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there
+Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel
+Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other
+Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller
+Now death has come to join its vague conjectures
+Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague
+Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned
+So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California
+Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Belated Guest
+by William Dean Howells
+
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