Page:A-Hunting of Deer-1906.djvu/11

Rh a warm eulogy of southern California. A genuine love of nature bore rich fruit in the Adirondack sketches In the Wilderness, from which the contents of this selection are taken.

By a natural transfer of his own habit into a more purely literary expression, Mr. Warner wrote a book, half story, half travel, entitled Their Pilgrimage, which carried several characters from one watering-place in America to another, enabling him thus to sketch manners and make observations in a light, satiric vein, on some phases of American life. This venture it was that led him probably into the more positive field of fictitious literature, and he produced A Little Journey in the World, which, under the guise of story, was really a serious inquiry into the tendencies of social life when affected strongly by the insidious influence of wealth, especially newly-gotten wealth. The publication of this novel led to the writing of two other novels, The Golden House and That Fortune, published at intervals of a few years. These novels carried forward some of the inquiries started in A Little Journey in the World, and the reappearance of certain characters, with a further delineation of their experience, gives the three books something of the form of a trilogy.

For several years Mr. Warner held an editorial position on Harper&rsquo;s Monthly, and many of his contributions were made to that magazine. The light, suggestive essay, best illustrated by his Backlog Studies, is perhaps the form of literature with which he is most identified, but the serious side of his nature is never held distinct from the humorous, as the vein of humor also runs through his more solid work. His interest in literature was always very strong, and led him into the delivery of some forcible addresses at college anniversaries and into the editorship of the American Men of Letters series, to which he contributed the volume on Washington Irving, who was his first great admiration in modern literature. He also conducted, as editor in chief,