WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 265 Scott's Poems f and wrote a diary and some poetry now en- tirely forgotten* The next sojourn of the young literary aspirant was in Col- umbus, where his father found work as reporter of legislative proceedings for the Ohio State Journal. William was em- ployed as a compositor. He was fourteen years old and be- gan to cherish a definite literary ambition. One of his i>oems, written at this time, on Spring, was the first piece he ever had printed. Soon after he began to read Pope, and a long period of imitation of that poet, who aimed above all things else to be correct in his use of language, set in. Of this imitation he writes, **I learned to choose between words after a study of their fitness. . . I could not imitate Pope without imitating his methods, and his method was to the last degree intelli- gent. ' ' We must not assume that the young poet was living in a world of fancy to the neglect of the real world of work and play and diflSculty. He writes of this period, **I was very fond of my work, and proud of my swiftness and skill in it. Once the foreman offered me a holiday, but I would not take it. What went on in the office interested me as much as the quarrels of the Augustan age of English letters and I made much more record of it in the crude and shapeless diary which Ikepf The few years following his first Columbus employment Howells spent in Ashtabula County, where his father edited the Ashtabula Sentinel, which was removed from Ashtabula village to Jefferson after six months. William became a sub- editor. Byron, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ossian, Shakespeare, Holmes, De Quincey, Thackeray, Ik Marvel, Dickens, Words- worth, LowelPs Lectures on Poetry, Chaucer, Macaulay, Poe's Criticisms, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Lamb, Four English Quar- terlies, books of fiction, drama, and history in Spanish, Cur- tis 's works on Oriental travel, Longfellow's Hiawatha, and Kavanaugh, Tennyson — all became known to him, besides much Spanish drama and German poetry, especially Heine's, and all influenced him. In a little space under the stairs in the low, rambling house where the family lived, he wrote, im- itating Pope, or Ossian, or Longfellow, or Tennyson. He be-
