Albert Bigelow Paine

“ He had brought along a small book called The Pith of Astronomy—a fascinating little volume—and he read from it about the great tempest of fire in the sun, where the waves of flame roll up two thousand miles high, though the sun itself is such a tiny star in the deeps of the universe.
If I dwell unwarrantably on this phase of Mark Twain's character, it is because it was always so fascinating to me, and the contemplation of the drama of the skies always meant so much to him, and somehow always seemed akin to him in its proportions. He had been born under a flaming star, a wanderer of the skies. ”

“ What I cannot help wishing is, that Adam and Eve had been postponed, and Martin Luther and Joan of Arc put in their place—that splendid pair equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of asbestos. By neither sugary persuasions nor by hell-fire could Satan have beguiled them to eat the apple.
There would have been results! Indeed yes. The apple would be intact to-day; there would be no human race; there would be no you; there would be no me. And the old, old creation-dawn scheme of ultimately launching me into the literary guild would have been defeated. ”

“ And further, let us try with all our strength to believe that whenever old simple-hearted George Holland sowed this seed, and reared his crop of broader charities and better impulses in men's hearts, it was just as acceptable before the Throne as if the seed had been scattered in vapid platitudes from the pulpit of the ineffable Sabine himself.
Am I saying that the pulpit does not do its share toward disseminating the marrow, the meat of the gospel of Christ? (For we are not talking of ceremonies and wire-drawn creeds now, but the living heart and soul of what is pretty often only a specter.) ”

“ He kept a room and his wardrobe there; but he paid a visit to Bay House—the lovely and quiet home of Helen's parents—and prolonged it from day to day, and from week to week, because it was a quiet and peaceful place with affectionate attention and limitless welcome. Clifford Trott had orders to come with the carriage each afternoon, and we drove down to Bay House for Mark Twain and his playmate, and then went wandering at will among the labyrinth of blossom-bordered, perfectly kept roadways of a dainty paradise, that never, I believe, becomes quite a reality even to those who know it best. ”

“ A throng of rapid-fire reporters and photographers immediately surrounded him, and when he left the ship the stevedores gave him a round of cheers. It was the beginning of that almost unheard-of demonstration of affection and honor which never for a moment ceased, but augmented from day to day during the four weeks of his English sojourn.
In a dictation following his return, Mark Twain said:
Who began it? The very people of all people in the world whom I would have chosen: a hundred men of my own class—grimy sons of labor, the real builders of empires and civilizations, the stevedores! ”

“ Clemens would arise from the table and carry certain choice food out on the terrace to Tammany, and be satisfied with almost no acknowledgment by way of appreciation. One could not imagine any home of Mark Twain where the cats were not supreme. In the evening, as at 21 Fifth Avenue, there was music—the stately measures of the orchestrelle—while Mark Twain smoked and mingled unusual speculation with long, long backward dreams. ”

“ Most of us are either dreaming of the past or anticipating the future—forever beating the dirge of yesterday or the tattoo of to-morrow. Mark Twain's step was timed to the march of the moment. There were days when he recalled the past and grieved over it, and when he speculated concerning the future; but his greater interest was always of the now, and of the particular locality where he found it. The thing which caught his fancy, however slight or however important, possessed him fully for the time, even if never afterward. ”

“ Clemens, you are not a pessimist, you only think you are." And she might have added, with equal force and truth:
"You are not a disbeliever in immortality; you only think you are."
Nothing could have conveyed more truly his attitude toward life and death. His belief in God, the Creator, was absolute; but it was a God far removed from the Creator of his early teaching. Every man builds his God according to his own capacities. Mark Twain's God was of colossal proportions—so vast, indeed, that the constellated stars were but molecules in His veins—a God as big as space itself. ”

“ Jervis Langdon was summoned from Elmira, for Jean would lie there with the others.
In the loggia stood the half-trimmed Christmas tree, and all about lay the packages of gifts, and in Jean's room, on the chairs and upon her desk, were piled other packages. Nobody had been forgotten. For her father she had bought a handsome globe; he had always wanted one. Once when I went into his room he said:
"I have been looking in at Jean and envying her. I have never greatly envied any one but the dead. I always envy the dead." ”

“ Yes. And soon. For I know my temperament. And I know that the temperament is master of the man, and that he is its fettered and helpless slave and must in all things do as it commands. A man's temperament is born in him, and no circumstances can ever change it.
My temperament has never allowed my spirits to remain depressed long
at a time.
That was a feature of Jean's temperament, too. She inherited it
from me. I think she got the rest of it from her mother.
Jean Clemens had two natural endowments: the gift of justice and a genuine passion for all nature. ”

“ DR. MARK TWAIN, Washington.
Great Scott, no! By the beard of the Prophet, no! How can you ask such a thing of me? I am a man of family. I cannot take chances, like other people. I cannot let a literature come in here which teaches that a man's wife is as good as the man himself. Such a doctrine cannot do any particular harm, of course, where the man has only one wife, for then it is a dead-level between them, and there is no humiliating inequality, and no resulting disorder ”

“ During my four weeks' sojourn in England I have had another lofty honor, a continuous honor, an honor which has flowed serenely along, without halt or obstruction, through all these twenty-six days, a most moving and pulse-stirring honor—the heartfelt grip of the hand, and the welcome that does not descend from the pale-gray matter of the brain, but rushes up with the red blood from the heart. It makes me proud and sometimes it makes me humble, too. ”

“ One man knows there is a hell, the next one knows there isn't; one man knows high tariff is right, the next man knows it isn't; one man knows monarchy is best, the next one knows it isn't; one age knows there are witches, the next one knows there aren't; one sect knows its religion is the only true one, there are sixty-four thousand five hundred million sects that know it isn't so. There is not a mind present among this multitude of verdict-deliverers that is the superior of the minds that persuade and represent the rest of the divisions of the multitude. ”

“ Adam's temperament was the first command the Deity ever issued to a human being on this planet. And it was the only command Adam would never be able to disobey. It said, "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable." The later command, to let the fruit alone, was certain to be disobeyed. Not by Adam himself, but by his temperament—which he did not create and had no authority over. For the temperament is the man; the thing tricked out with clothes and named Man is merely its Shadow, nothing more. The law of the tiger's temperament is, Thou shaft kill ”

“ They saw the panorama of history file by, a wonderful spectacle which made Oxford a veritable dream of the Middle Ages. The lanes and streets and meadows were thronged with such costumes as Oxford had seen in its long history. History was realized in a manner which no one could appreciate more fully than Mark Twain.
"I was particularly anxious to see this pageant," he said, "so that I could get ideas for my funeral procession, which I am planning on a large scale." ”

“ You are ten thousand feet above them, but yet you seem to stand in a basin, with the green islands here and there, and the valleys and the wide ocean, and the remote snow-peak of Mauna Loa, all raised up before and above you, and pictured out like a brightly tinted map hung at the ceiling of a room.
You look up at everything; nothing is below you. It has a singular and startling effect to see a miniature world thus seemingly hung in mid-air. ”

“ Russia had to be left out because exile to Siberia remains, and in that single punishment is gathered together and concentrated all the bitter inventions of all the black ages for the infliction of suffering upon human beings. Exile for life from one's hearthstone and one's idols—this is rack, thumb-screw, the water-drop, fagot and stake, tearing asunder by horses, flaying alive—all these in one ”

“ Amelia Dunne Hookway, who had conducted some children's plays at the Howland School, Chicago, Mark Twain once wrote: "If I were going to begin life over again I would have a children's theater and watch it, and work for it, and see it grow and blossom and bear its rich moral and intellectual fruitage; and I should get more pleasure and a saner and healthier profit out of my vocation than I should ever be able to get out of any other, constituted as I am. Yes, you are easily the most fortunate of women, I think." ”

“ But with my microbe-eye I could see every individual of the whirling billions of atoms that compose the speck. Nothing is ever at rest—wood, iron, water, everything is alive, everything is raging, whirling, whizzing, day and night and night and day, nothing is dead, there is no such thing as death, everything is full of bristling life, tremendous life, even the bones of the crusader that perished before Jerusalem eight centuries ago. There are no vegetables, all things are animal ”

“ Happy, happy world, that knows at last that these obscure innocents are no longer responsible for the blemishless teachings, the power, the pathos, the logic, and the other and manifold intellectual pyrotechnics that seduce, but to damn, the Opera House assemblages every Sunday night in Elmira! And miserable, O thrice miserable Beecher! For the Ministerial Union of Elmira will never, no, never more be responsible to God for his shortcomings. ”

“ In this, mine and the public's is a common regret. For it is plain that in the person of Ruloff one of the most marvelous of intellects that any age has produced is about to be sacrificed, and that, too, while half the mystery of its strange powers is yet a secret. Here is a man who has never entered the doors of a college or a university, and yet by the sheer might of his innate gifts has made himself such a colossus in abstruse learning that the ablest of our scholars are but pigmies in his presence. ”

“ The same men who enthusiastically preach loyal consistency to church and party are always ready and willing and anxious to persuade a Chinaman or an Indian or a Kanaka to desert his church or a fellow-American to desert his party. The man who deserts to them is all that is high and pure and beautiful—apparently; the man who deserts from them is all that is foul and despicable. ”

“ It was on Christmas Day that they went with Jean on her last journey. Katie Leary, her baby nurse, had dressed her in the dainty gown which she had worn for Clara's wedding, and they had pinned on it a pretty buckle which her father had brought her from Bermuda, and which she had not seen. No Greek statue was ever more classically beautiful than she was, lying there in the great living-room, which in its brief history had seen so much of the round of life. ”

“ Franklin realizes that no atom is destructible; that it has always existed and will exist forever; but he thinks all atoms will go out of this world some day and continue their life in a happier one. Old Tolliver thinks no atom's life will ever end, but he also thinks Blitzowski is the only world it will ever see, and that at no time in its eternity will it be either worse off or better off than it is now and always has been. Of course he thinks the planet Blitzowski is itself eternal and indestructible—at any rate he says he thinks that. ”

“ His favorite weapon was humor—good-humor—with logic behind it. A sort of glorified truth it was truth wearing a smile of gentleness, hence all the more quickly heeded.
"He will be remembered with the great humorists of all time," says Howells, "with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy of his company; none of them was his equal in humanity."
Mark Twain understood the needs of men because he was himself supremely human. In one of his dictations he said:
I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not possess in either a small or a large way. ”

“ Once with gentle humor, looking over a white daisy field, he said:
"That is buckwheat. I always recognize buckwheat when I see it. I wish I knew as much about other things as I know about buckwheat. It seems to be very plentiful here; it even grows by the roadside." And a little later: "This is the kind of a road I like; a good country road through the woods."
The water was flowing over the mill-dam where the road crosses the Saugatuck, and he expressed approval of that clear, picturesque little river, one of those charming Connecticut streams. ”

“ I revere that library. It is the author's friend. I don't care how mean a book is, it always takes one copy. [A copy of every book printed in Great Britain must by law be sent to the British Museum, a law much complained of by publishers.] And then every day that author goes there to gaze at that book, and is encouraged to go on in the good work. And what a touching sight it is of a Saturday afternoon to see the poor, careworn clergymen gathered together in that vast reading-room cabbaging sermons for Sunday! ”

“ Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not a single life that was ever lived that was worth living. Not a single child ever begotten that the begetting of it was not a crime. Suppose a community of people to be living on the slope of a volcano, directly under the crater and in the path of lava-flow; that volcano has been breaking out right along for ages and is certain to break out again. They do not know when it will break out, but they know it will do it—that much can be counted on. ”