Jean's death he sought the warm climate of Bermuda. But his malady made
rapid progress, and in April he returned to Stormfield. He died there
just a week later, April 21, 1910.

Any attempt to designate Mark Twain's place in the world's literary
history would be presumptuous now. Yet I cannot help thinking that he
will maintain his supremacy in the century that produced him. I think so
because, of all the writers of that hundred years, his work was the most
human his utterances went most surely to the mark. In the long analysis
of the ages it is the truth that counts, and he never approximated, never
compromised, but pronounced those absolute verities to which every human
being of whatever rank must instantly respond.

His understanding of subjective human nature--the vast, unwritten life
within--was simply amazing. Such knowledge he acquired at the
fountainhead--that is, from himself. He recognized in himself an extreme
example of the human being with all the attributes of power and of
weakness, and he made his exposition complete.

The world will long miss Mark Twain; his example and his teaching will be
neither ignored nor forgotten. Genius defies the laws of perspective and
looms larger as it recedes. The memory of Mark Twain remains to us a
living and intimate presence that today, even more than in life,
constitutes a stately moral bulwark reared against hypocrisy and
superstition--a mighty national menace to sham.