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 But to a wide and growing list of readers his essays and letters are the best work.

We have seen that he was a teller of tales and a lover of them all his life. When he wrote, he lived not only in the characters but in the scenes of his stories. His sympathies were, as he has told in A Little Gossip on Romance, all with the romantic school. For him the unusual, the striking, the quaint and the heroic held the greatest charm. He admired Scott, Dumas, and the other great romancists. He was fertile in invention. He conceived many plans for stories, dramas, and other books that he never found time and strength to write. All his life the world was rich and full to him; as it had been in his observant and imaginative childhood, so it continued to be in his fuller and richer manhood.

I have already spoken of his painstaking efforts to master his craft. Few prose writers have had so keen a sense of style or so zealous a desire to write well. Not only his essays, but even his stories, were rewritten and polished again and again. And so he came to the power of saying perfectly just the exact thing that he meant to say. When we read him we have the satisfaction that comes from feeling that we and the author are in perfect accord.

But this is not the only, or even the greatest, satisfaction that he gives us. I have spoken of his richness of observation and invention. He is never dull. Every page—every sentence almost—has its charm either in the picture or the idea it suggests. His books are full of vivid action, life-like and convincing touches of character portrayal, descriptions of scenes and places, each with its special charm. And to many readers his revelation of his own personal qualities is the greatest charm of all. What he sees, he has seen for himself, not through others' eyes. His thoughts are his own, not the borrowed garments of other men. His good humor, his playful spirit, his high courage, his innate