ountry delighted to bestow
upon him. And there too was that gallant struggle to pay off a
tremendous debt, begun at sixty--and accomplished one year sooner than
he expected--after the most spectacular and remarkable lecture tour in
history. The beautiful chivalric spirit of this great soul shone
brightest in disaster. He insisted that it was his wife who refused to
compromise his debts for forty cents on the dollar--that it was she who
declared it must be dollar for dollar; and when a fund was raised by his
admirers to assist in lightening his burden, that it was his wife who
refused to accept it, though he was willing enough to accept it as a
welcome relief.

As an American, I can say nothing more significantly characteristic of
the man than that he was a good citizen. He possessed in rich measure
the consciousness of personal responsibility for the standards,
government, and ideals of his town, his city, and his country. Civic
conscientiousness burned strong within him; and he fought to develop and
to maintain breadth of public view and sanity of popular ideals. Blind
patriotism was impossible for this great American: he exposed the
shallowness of popular enthusiasms and the narrowness of rampant
spread-eagleism, without regard for consequence to himself or his
popularity. What a tribute to his personality that, instead of suffering,
he gained in popularity by his honest and downright outspokenness! He
wielded the lash of his bitter scorn and fearful irony upon the
wrong-doer, the hypocrite, the fraud; and aroused public opinion to
impatience with public abuse, open offence, and official discourtesy.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens impressed me as the most complete and human
individual I have ever known. He was not a great thinker; his views
were not "advanced".

The glory of his temperament was its splendid sanity, balance, and
normality. The homeliest virtues of life were his the republican virtue
of simplicity; the domestic virtue of, personal purity and passionately
simple regard for the sanctity of the marriage bond; the civic virtue of
public honesty; the business virtue of stainless private honour. Mark
Twain was one of the supreme literary geniuses of his time. But he was
something even more than this. He was not simply a great genius: he was
a great man.

"Exhilaration can be infinite, like sorrow; a joke
can be so big that it breaks the roof of the stars.
By