CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
Humor he has, and of the very highest order. It is as delicate as Washington Irving’s, and quite as spontaneous. But humor is hardly his predominant quality. He has all the wit of Holmes, and all the tenderness of Ik Marvel. He is often charmingly thoughtful, earnest and suggestive.—San Francisco Bulletin.
There is only one other pair of microscopic eyes like his owned by an American, and they belong to W. D. Howells. These two men will ferret out fun from arid sands and naked rocks, and in one trip of a league, less or more, over a barren waste, see and hear more that is amusing and entertaining than the rest of the world will discover in crossing a continent. Such men should do our traveling for us.—Chicago Tribune.
From “Back-Log Studies.”
The fire on the hearth has almost gone out in New England; the hearth has gone out; the family has lost its center; age ceases to be respected; sex is only distinguished by the difference between millinery bills and tailors’ bills; there is no more toast-and-cider; the young are not allowed to eat mince pies at ten o’clock at night; half a cheese is no longer set to toast before the fire; you scarcely ever see in front of the coals a row of roasting apples, which a bright little girl, with many a dive and start, shielding her sunny face from the fire with one hand, turns from time to time; scarce are the grey-haired sires who strop their razors on the family Bible, and doze in the chimney corner. A good many things have gone out with the fire on the hearth.
I do not mean to say that public and private morality have vanished with the hearth. A good degree of purity and considerable happiness are possible with grates and blowers; it is a day of trial, when we are all passing through a fiery furnace, and very likely we shall be purified as we are dried up and wasted away. Of course the family is gone as an institution, though there still are attempts to bring up a family round a “register.” But you might just as well try to bring it up by hand as without the rallying-point of a hearth-stone. Are there any homesteads now-a-days? Do people hesitate to change houses any more than they do to change their clothes? People hire houses as they would a masquerade costume, liking, sometimes, to appear for a year in a little fictitious stone-front splendor above their means. Thus it happens that so many people live in houses that do not fit them. I should almost as soon think of wearing another person’s clothes as his house; unless I could let it out and take it in until it fitted, and somehow expressed my own character and taste.
From “Being a Boy.”
It is a wonder that every New England boy does not turn out a poet, or a missionary or a peddler. Most of them used to. There is something in the heart of the New England hills to feed the imagination of the boy and excite his longing for strange countries. I scarcely know what the subtle influence is that forms him and attracts him in the most fascinating and aromatic of all lands, and yet urges him away from all the sweet delights of his home to become roamer in literature and in the world a poet and a wanderer. There is something in the soil and in the pure air, I suspect, that promises more romance than is forthcoming, and that excites the imagination without satisfying it, and begets the desire of adventure.
What John said was, that he didn’t care much for pumpkin pie; but that was after he had eaten a whole one. It seemed to him then that mince would be better. The feeling of a boy toward pumpkin pie has never been properly considered.… His elders say that the boy is always hungry; but that is a very coarse way of putting it. He has only recently come into a world that is full of good things to eat, and there is on the whole a very short time in which to eat them; at least he is told, among the first information he receives, that life is brief. Life being brief, and pie and the like fleeting, he very soon decides on an active campaign. It may be an old story to people who have been eating for forty or fifty years; but it is different with a beginner. He takes the thick and thin as it comes—as to pie, for instance. Some people do make them very thin.