The autobiographical writings of Howells leave us with the impression of a gentle, contemplative boy given rather to reading and dreaming in a solitary corner than to Mark-Twain-like activities with Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns. Though by birth and rearing he was a complete Westerner of the river section, mingling freely with all its elements, he seems never to have taken root in the region or to have been much influenced by it. He has spoken somewhere of De Quincey as a man "eliminated from his time and place by his single love for books." Howells, like James, was a detached soul. From his earliest youth he was not a resident of Ohio, but a resident of the vaster world of literature. He read enormously and with passion, and from his boyhood he seems--also like Henry James--to have had no dream of other than a literary career. He saw not the headlong West that surged about him but the realms of poetry and romance. "To us who have our lives so largely in books," he wrote in later years, "the material world is always the fable, and the ideal the fact. I walked with my feet on the ground, but my head was in the clouds, as light as any of them.... I was living in a time of high political tumult, and I certainly cared very much for the question of slavery which was then filling the minds of men; I felt deeply the shame and wrong of our fugitive slave law; I was stirred by the news from Kansas, where the great struggle between the two great principles in our nationality was beginning in bloodshed; but I cannot pretend that any of these things were more than ripples on the surface of my intense and profound interest in literature."[99] It is suggestive that his earliest "passions" among the authors were Goldsmith, Irving, and Cervantes, and later Pope, Macaulay, and Curtis--the most of them literary artists and finishers, with grace of style and softness and dreaminess of atmosphere, rather than stormy creators who blazed new trails and crashed into the unknown with lawless power. He taught himself the use of literary English by painstaking imitation of the classics which took his young fancy. His passion for Pope was long continued. When other boys in the schools were shirking their English grammar, Howells week after week and month after month was toiling at imitations of the great master of incisive English, "rubbing and polishing at my wretched verses till they did sometimes take on an effect, which, if it was not like Pope's, was like none of mine." From him "I learned how to choose between words after a study of their fitness." Juveniles and boys' books of adventure he seems never to have known. From the first he was enamoured of the classics, and of the classics best fitted to educate him for the career that was to be his: "my reading from the first was such as to enamour me of clearness, of definiteness."