Twain's humor is not to be classed
with the fragile plants; it has a serious root striking deep down into
rich earth, and I think it will go on flowering indefinitely.

I HAVE been imagining an ideal critical journal, whose plan should
involve the discharge of the chief literary critic and the installment
of a fresh censor on the completion of each issue. To place a man in
permanent absolute control of a certain number of pages, in which to
express his opinions, is to place him in a position of great personal
danger, It is almost inevitable that he should come to overrate
the importance of those opinions, to take himself with far too much
seriousness, and in the end adopt the dogma of his own infallibility.
The liberty to summon this or that man-of-letters to a supposititious
bar of justice is apt to beget in the self-appointed judge an
exaggerated sense of superiority. He becomes impatient of any rulings
not his, and says in effect, if not in so many words: "I am Sir Oracle,
and when I ope my lips let no dog bark." When the critic reaches this
exalted frame of mind his slight usefulness is gone.

AFTER a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge and
signs it with a rainbow.

I LIKE to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every
detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the
desire to use its own wings. The partly draped statue has a charm which
the nude lacks. Who would have those marble folds slip from the raised
knee of the Venus of Melos? Hawthorne knew how to make his lovely
thought lovelier by sometimes half veiling it.

I HAVE just tested the nib of a new pen on a slight fancy which Herrick
has handled twice in the "Hesperides." The fancy, however, is not
Herrick's; it is as old as poetry and the exaggeration of lovers, and I
have the same privilege as another to try my fortune with it:

UP ROOS THE SONNE, AND UP ROOS EMELYE CHAUCER

When some hand has partly drawn The cloudy curtains of her bed, And my
lady's golden head Glimmers in the dusk like dawn, Then methinks is day
begun. Later, when her dream has ceased And she softly stirs and
wakes, Then it is as when the East A sudden rosy magic takes From the
cloud-enfolded sun, And full day breaks!

Shakespeare, who has done so much to discourage literature by
anticipating everybody, puts the whole matter into a nutshell:

But soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and
Juli