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Literary Friends and Acquaintance; a Personal Retrospect of American Authorship by William Dean Howells
page 7 of 206 (03%)

In fact I think we were all rather modest young fellows, we who formed
the group wont to spend some part of every evening at that house, where
there was always music, or whist, or gay talk, or all three. We had our
opinions of literary matters, but (perhaps because we had mostly accepted
them from England or New England, as I have said) we were not vain of
them; and we would by no means have urged them before a living literary
man like that. I believe none of us ventured to speak, except the poet,
my roommate, who said, He believed so and so was the original of so and
so; and was promptly told, He had no right to say such a thing.
Naturally, we came away rather critical of our host's guest, whom I
afterwards knew as the kindliest heart in the world. But we had not
shone in his presence, and that galled us; and we chose to think that he
had not shone in ours.




III

At that time he was filling a large space in the thoughts of the young
people who had any thoughts about literature. He had come to his full
repute as an agreeable and intelligent traveller, and he still wore the
halo of his early adventures afoot in foreign lands when they were yet
really foreign. He had not written his novels of American life, once so
welcomed, and now so forgotten; it was very long before he had achieved
that incomparable translation of Faust which must always remain the
finest and best, and which would keep his name alive with Goethe's, if he
had done nothing else worthy of remembrance. But what then most
commended him to the regard of us star-eyed youth (now blinking sadly
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