LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Roundabout to Boston

by William Dean Howells



ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON

During the four years of my life in Venice the literary intention was
present with me at all times and in all places. I wrote many things in
verse, which I sent to the magazines in every part of the
English-speaking world, but they came unerringly back to me, except in
three instances only, when they were kept by the editors who finally
printed them. One of these pieces was published in the Atlantic Monthly;
another in Harpers Magazine; the third was got into the New York Ledger
through the kindness of Doctor Edward Everett Hale, who used I know not
what mighty magic to that end. I had not yet met him; but he interested
himself in my ballad as if it had been his own. His brother, Charles
Hale, later Consul-General for Egypt, whom I saw almost every moment of
the two visits he paid Venice in my time, had sent it to him, after
copying it in his own large, fair hand, so that it could be read. He was
not quite of that literary Boston which I so fondly remembered my
glimpses of; he was rather of a journalistic and literary Boston which I
had never known; but he was of Boston, after all. He had been in
Lowell's classes at Harvard; he had often met Longfellow in Cambridge; he
knew Doctor Holmes, of course; and he let me talk of my idols to my
heart's content. I think he must have been amused by my raptures; most
people would have been; but he was kind and patient, and he listened to
me with a sweet intelligence which I shall always gratefully remember. He
died too young, with his life's possibilities mainly unfulfilled; but