WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 267 of the Ohio State Joumaly reorganized under a new Repub- lican management. Howells's work included writing literary notices and book reviews, to which he gave chief attention. He entered the society of the capital and appreciated the hap- py, free, and cordial atmosphere with all the zest of a well- ocoupiedy enthusiastic young man of twenty-two. George El- ioty Hawthorne, and Goethe were the new friends of the inner world of literature whom he came to know in the two years spent at this post. He sent some poems to the Atlantic Month- ly and Lowell accepted six of them. Two books in which Howells had part were published in 1860 ; the first was Poems of Two Friends^ by Howells and John J. Piatt ; the other was The Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin^ to which Mr. Howells contributed the biography of Lincoln. With the money obtained from the biography of Lincoln Mr. Howells made a trip down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, and thence by rail to Boston. There he met Lowell, Holmes, Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne. He asked James T. Fields for a position on the staff of the Atlantic Monthly j but learned that all positions were filled. From Boston he went to New York and came in contact with Walt Whitman and Edmund Clarence Stedman. Less as a reward for his services in the Republican campaign of 1860 than because Mr. Nicolay and Mr. Hay, Lincoln's private secretaries, were interested in him, Mr. Howells was appointed consul at Venice.
- During the four years of my life in Venice the literary
purpose was with me at aU times and in all places," writes Mr. Howells, * * . . . the literary defeats [in poetry] threw me upon prose; for some sort of literary thing ... I must do if I lived ; and I began to write those studies of Ven- etian life which afterwards became a book." He had studied Italian from a grammar taken with him on his voyage to Ven- ice. Dante became known to him, but modem Italian litera- ture — the comedies of Goldoni, the novels and poems of Man- zoni and D 'Azeglio — had greater interest for Mr. Howells. Recent Italian Comedy ^ and, later, Modern Italian Poets were the literary fruits of this reading and study.
