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With love from us all to you all.
Affectionately
SAM.
Mark Twain had a few books that he read regularly every year or two.
Among these were 'Pepys's Diary', Suetonius's 'Lives of the Twelve
Caesars', and Thomas Carlyle's 'French Revolution'. He had a passion for
history, biography, and personal memoirs of any sort. In his early life
he had cared very little for poetry, but along in the middle eighties
he somehow acquired a taste for Browning and became absorbed in it. A
Browning club assembled as often as once a week at the Clemens home in
Hartford to listen to his readings of the master. He was an impressive
reader, and he carefully prepared himself for these occasions,
indicating by graduated underscorings, the exact values he wished to
give to words and phrases. Those were memorable gatherings, and they
must have continued through at least two winters. It is one of the
puzzling phases of Mark Twain's character that, notwithstanding his
passion for direct and lucid expression, he should have found pleasure
in the poems of Robert Browning.
*
****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
710
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