This in fine is the most summary statement of his career in literature,--that he has been a keen and sympathetic observer of life, and has caught its character, not like a reporter going about with a kodak and snapping it aimlessly at any conspicuous object, but like an alert artist who goes back to his studio after a walk and sets down his comments on what he has seen in quick, accurate sketches, now and then resolving numberless undrawn sketches into some one comprehensive and beautiful picture. THE SEQUENCE OF MR. HOWELLS'S BOOKS. Mr. Howells is the author of nearly seventy books, from which the following are selected as best representing his work in various fields and at various periods. Venetian Life. Travel and description. 1867. Their Wedding Journey. Novel. 1871. Italian Journeys. Travel and description. 1872. Suburban Sketches. 1872. Poems. 1873 and 1895. A Chance Acquaintance. Novel. 1873. A Foregone Conclusion. Novel. 1874. A Counterfeit Presentment. Comedy. 1877. The Lady of the Aroostook. Novel. 1879. The Undiscovered Country. Novel. 1880. A Fearful Responsibility, and Other Stories. 1881. A Modern Instance. Novel. 1881. The Rise of Silas Lapham. Novel. 1884. Tuscan Cities. Travel and description. 1885. April Hopes. Novel. 1887. A Hazard of New Fortunes. Novel. 1889. The Sleeping Car, and Other Farces. 1889. A Boy's Town. Reminiscences. 1890. Criticism and Fiction. Essays. 1891. My Literary Passions. Essays. 1895. Stops of Various Quills. Poems. 1895. Literary Friends and Acquaintances. Reminiscences, 1900. Heroines of Fiction. Criticism. 1901. The Kentons. Novel. 1902. Literature and Life. Criticism. 1902. London Films. Travel and Description. 1905. A MODERN INSTANCE. I. The village stood on a wide plain, and around it rose the mountains. They were green to their tops in summer, and in winter white through their serried pines and drifting mists, but at every season serious and beautiful, furrowed with hollow shadows, and taking the light on masses and stretches of iron-gray crag. The river swam through the plain in long curves, and slipped away at last through an unseen pass to the southward, tracing a score of miles in its course over a space that measured but three or four. The plain was very fertile, and its features, if few and of purely utilitarian beauty, had a rich luxuriance, and there was a tropical riot of vegetation when the sun of July beat on those northern fields. They waved with corn and oats to the feet of the mountains, and the potatoes covered a vast acreage with the lines of their intense, coarse green; the meadows were deep with English grass to the banks of the river, that, doubling and returning upon itself, still marked its way with a dense fringe of alders and white birches.