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hour of his beginnings.
*
****
To Mark Twain, from Samuel Merwin:
PLAINFIELD, N. J.
August 4, 1903.
DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--For a good many years I have been struggling with
the
temptation to write you and thank you for the work you have done; and
to-day I seem to be yielding.
During the past two years I have been reading through a group of writers
who seem to me to represent about the best we have--Sir Thomas Malory,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Boswell, Carlyle, Le Sage. In thinking over one
and then another, and then all of them together, it was plain to see
why they were great men and writers: each brought to his time some new
blood, new ideas,--turned a new current into the stream. I suppose
there have always been the careful, painstaking writers, the men who are
always taken so seriously by their fellow craftsmen. It seems to be the
unconventional man who is so rare--I mean the honestly unconventional
man, who has to express himself in his own big way because the
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