But Howells was not born cultivated; he achieved cultivation by a process of self-discipline that has few parallels in the history of literature. He is a classicist as James is a classicist. If his style is clear and concise, if he knows as few modern authors the resources of the English tongue, it is because he gave without reserve to the mastering of it all the enthusiasm and time and strength of his youth and young manhood. He was not a genius: he was a man of talent of the Pope-Macaulay order that makes of literature not a thing of inspirations and flashes and visions, but a profession to be learned as one learns the pipe organ after years of practice, as an art demanding an exquisite skill to be gained only by unremitting toil. VII The Howells of the earlier period was a poet. Speaking of the winter of 1859-60, which saw the publication of his first volume, he writes: "It seemed to me as if the making and the reading of poetry were to go on forever, and that was to be all there was to it." "Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to be anything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far forget myself as to be a novelist." His reading more and more was in the poets. Heine he read with passion, and Longfellow and Tennyson, and then Heine, evermore Heine. "Nearly ten years afterwards Mr. Lowell wrote me about something of mine that he had been reading: 'You must sweat the Heine out of your bones as men do mercury.'" The seven poems which Lowell accepted and printed in the _Atlantic_ in 1860 and 1861 are redolent of Heine, with here and there traces of Longfellow. When he came East just before his appointment to Venice it was as a poet, and a poet making a pilgrimage to the mother-land of poesy. New England was to him indeed a land of dreams and romance. "As the passionate pilgrim from the West," to use his own words, "approached his Holy Land at Boston," he felt like putting the shoes from off his feet. New England was the home of Emerson and Longfellow and Holmes, of Whittier and Hawthorne and Lowell, and all the _Atlantic_ immortals, and he appreciated it as Irving and Willis had appreciated old England earlier in the century, or as Longfellow and Taylor had appreciated the continent of Europe.