WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 273 came to me through the open window breathed as if from an autumnal night of the middle eighteen-fif ties in a little village of northeastern Ohio. I was now going to see, for the first time, the city where so great a part of my Hf e was then passed, and in this magical air the two epochs were blent in reciprocal assodation. The question of my present identity was a thing indifferent and apart ; it did not matter who or where or when I was. Youth and age were at one with each other : the boy abiding in the old man, and the old man pensively willing to dwell for the enchanted moment in any vantage of the past which would give him shelter. In that dignified and deliber- ate Spanish train I was a man of seventy-four crossing the last barrier of hills that helped keep Granada from her con- querors, and at the same time I was a boy of seventeen in the little room under the stairs in a house now practically re- moter than the Alhambra, finding my unguided way through some Spanish story of the vanished kingdom of the Moors. ' ' Although in his youth Mr. Howells never went to a univer- sity, in his maturity the great universities came to him. Ox- ford, Harvard, Tale, and Columbia honored themselves in honoring him with the highest degrees in their gift. Through countless difficulties and discouragements Mr. Howells has gained and held the proud place of Dean of American Letters and a place in the hearts of the young American readers of all ages, which is more valued by him than the pride of his dis- tinguished i>osition. He, of the whole group of notable men- of-letters in American annals, is the most completely rep- resentative of all that is best and deepest in American life. Some of these American characteristics for which he stands are: honest workmanship, continental breadth opposed to provincialism, insularity, or old-world worship ; in his highest efforts art is always placed below humanity ; always he suc- ceeds in seeing the situation sanely, with the large, charitable American sense of humor. One of our sanest of American critics has stated that more and more is the quality of crafts- manship held in esteem, since, after all, the message any writer has to deliver is the gift of God and the writer *s con- tribution is the manner in which he delivers the message. The
