Sketches, pictures of life, studies of manners, these are the object of the book. The author is not writing to record incidents, for there are few incidents to record. "That which they [the bridal pair] found the most difficult of management," he declares, "was the want of incident for the most part of the time; and I who write their history might also sink under it, but that I am supported by the fact that it is so typical in this respect. I even imagine the ideal reader for whom one writes as yawning over these barren details with the life-like weariness of an actual traveling companion of theirs." As a story from the standpoint of Bonner's _New York Ledger_, then in the high tide of its prosperity, it was dreary reading. But it was true in every line, true of background, and true to the facts of human life as Howells saw those facts. "Ah! poor real life, which I love," he exclaims, after a minute sketch of a commercial traveler and some loud-voiced girls on the train, "can I make others share the delight I share in thy foolish and insipid face?" But this earlier Howells gives us more than real life: he gives us real life touched with the glow of poetry, for the poet in Howells died a lingering death. It seems as if novel-writing had come to him, as he declares all of his literary life had come, almost without his willing it. It grew gradually and naturally out of his sketch-writing. In his early sketch books he had studied places and "men in their actuality," and he would now make his sketches more comprehensive and bind them with a thread of narrative. A sketch like "A Day's Outing" in _Suburban Sketches_, and a "novel" like _Their Wedding Journey_ differ only in the single element of quantity. _A Chance Acquaintance_, the record of another sentimental journey, with its careful sketches along the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and at Quebec, and its _Pride-and-Prejudice_-like study of a typical Bostonian and a Western girl, has more of story than the earlier book, but it is still a sketch book rather than a novel. _Private Theatricals_, his fourth essay at fiction, is so minute a study of a particular summer boarding house and its patrons that it was never allowed to get beyond serial publication, at least one can think of no other reason for its suppression, and _The Undiscovered Country_ might be entitled _Sketches Among the Spiritualists and the Shakers_. The Howells of this earlier period has little of story and little of problem. His object is to present men and manners "in their actuality." _A Foregone Conclusion_, the most idyllic of his novels, in reality is an added chapter to _Venetian Life_, written in the retrospect of later years. The golden light of Venice is over it, a Venice now more mellow and poetic because it is a part of the author's vanishing youth--his _alma mater_, as it were; more golden every year. The springtime is in every page of it.