I am quite at a loss to know why my reading had this direction or that in those days. It had necessarily passed beyond my father’s suggestion, and I think it must have been largely by accident or experiment that I read one book rather than another. He made some sort of newspaper arrangement with a book-store in Cleveland, which was the means of enriching our home library with a goodly number of books, shop-worn, but none the worse for that, and new in the only way that books need be new to the lover of them. Among these I found a treasure in Curtis’s two books, the ‘Nile Notes of a Howadji,’ and the ‘Howadji in Syria.’ I already knew him by his ‘Potiphar Papers,’ and the ever-delightful reveries which have since gone under the name of ‘Prue and I;’ but those books of Eastern travel opened a new world of thinking and feeling. They had at once a great influence upon me. The smooth richness of their diction; the amiable¹ sweetness of their mood, their gracious caprice, the delicacy² of their satire³ (which was so kind that it should have some other name), their abundance of light and color, and the deep heart of humanity underlying⁴ their airiest fantasticality, all united in an effect which was different from any I had yet known.
As usual, I steeped myself in them, and the first runnings of my fancy when I began to pour it out afterwards were of their flavor. I tried to write like this new master; but whether I had tried or not, I should probably have done so from the love I bore him. He was a favorite not only of mine, but of all the young people in the village who were reading current literature, so that on this ground at least I had abundant sympathy. The present generation can have little notion of the deep impression made upon the intelligence and conscience of the whole nation by the ‘Potiphar Papers,’ or how its fancy was rapt with the ‘Prue and I’ sketches⁵, These are among the most veritable literary successes we have had, and probably we who were so glad when the author of these beautiful things turned aside from the flowery paths where he led us, to battle for freedom in the field of politics, would have felt the sacrifice too great if we could have dreamed it would be life-long. But, as it was, we could only honor him the more, and give him a place in our hearts which he shared with Longfellow.

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