The day was one of those that can come to the world only in early June at Venice. The heaven was without a cloud, but a blue haze made mystery of the horizon where the lagoon and sky met unseen. The breath of the sea bathed in freshness the city at whose feet her tides sparkled and slept.... The long garland of vines that festoons all Italy seemed to begin in the neighboring orchards; the meadows waved their long grasses in the sun, and broke in poppies as the sea-waves break in iridescent spray; the poplars marched in stately procession on either side of the straight, white road to Padua, till they vanished in the long perspective. One loves to linger over this early Howells, despite all his diffuseness and his lack of dramatic power. One knows that there is a fatal weakness in the attempted tragedy of the priest, that the tale does not grip and compel and haunt the soul as such a tale must if it be worth telling at all, that its ending is sprawling and conventional, and yet one cannot but feel that there is in it, as there is in all of the work of this earlier period of the author's life, youth and freshness and beauty--and poetry. These earlier studies are not merely cold observations upon life and society, analysis as of reactions in a test-tube; these are the creations of a young poet, a romancer, a dreamer: the later manner was an artificial acquirement like the taste for olives. IX Howells's second literary period begins with the year 1881 when he resigned the editorship of the _Atlantic Monthly_ and settled in the country at Belmont to devote all his time to the writing of fiction for the _Century_ magazine. During the decade that followed he produced his two strongest works, _A Modern Instance_, and _The Rise of Silas Lapham_, and also _A Woman's Reason_, _The Minister's Charge_, _Indian Summer_, and others. He had found his life work. During the earlier period he had been, as it were, experimenting; he had published fifteen books, only five of which were novels, but it was clear now that the five pointed the way he was to go. He began now with larger canvas and with more sweep and freedom. No more idyllic sketches now: his business was to make studies at full length of American character and American manners. He would do for New England what Jane Austen had done for her narrow little corner of old England. He too had "the exquisite touch," to use the words of Sir Walter Scott, "which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment." Like her he would bring no message and analyze no passion more intense than the perplexity of a maiden with two lovers; and like her he would deal not with the problems of the soul of man, but with the manners of a small province.