more pitied than hated me for my bad taste. He seemed not to have any
preferences among novelists; or at least I never heard him express any.
He used to read the modern novels I praised, in or out of print; but I do
not think he much liked reading fiction. As for plays, he detested the
theatre, and said he would as lief do a sum as follow a plot on the
stage. He could not, or did not, give any reasons for his literary
abhorrences, and perhaps he really had none. But he could have said very
distinctly, if he had needed, why he liked the books he did. I was away
at the time of his great Browning passion, and I know of it chiefly from
hearsay; but at the time Tolstoy was doing what could be done to make me
over Clemens wrote, "That man seems to have been to you what Browning was
to me." I do not know that he had other favorites among the poets, but
he had favorite poems which he liked to read to you, and he read, of
course, splendidly. I have forgotten what piece of John Hay's it was
that he liked so much, but I remembered how he fiercely revelled in the
vengefulness of William Morris's 'Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast,' and how
he especially exalted in the lines which tell of the supposed speaker's
joy in slaying the murderer of his brother:

"I am threescore years and ten,
And my hair is 'nigh turned gray,
But I am glad to think of the moment when
I took his life away."

Generally, I fancy his pleasure in poetry was not great, and I do not
believe he cared much for the conventionally accepted masterpieces of
literature. He liked to find out good things and great things for
himself; sometimes he would discover these in a masterpiece new to him
alone, and then, if you brought his ignorance home to him, he enjoyed it,
and enjoyed it the more the more you rubbed it in.