“Not at all. On my return to America my literary life took such form that most of my reading was done for review. I wrote at first a good many of the lighter criticisms in ‘The Nation,’ and then I went to Boston, to become assistant editor of ‘The Atlantic Monthly,’ where I wrote the literary notices for that periodical for four or five years.” “You were eventually editor of the ‘Atlantic,’ were you not?” “Yes, until 1881; and I have had some sort of close relation with magazines ever since.” “Would you say that all literary success is very difficult to achieve?” I ventured. “All that is enduring.” “It seems to me ours is an age when fame comes quickly.” “Speaking of quickly made reputations,” said Mr. Howells, meditatively, “did you ever hear of Alexander Smith? He was a poet who, in the fifties, was proclaimed immortal by the critics, and ranked with Shakespeare. I myself read him with an ecstacy which, when I look over his work to-day, seems ridiculous. His poem, ‘Life-Drama,’ was heralded as an epic, and set alongside of ‘Paradise Lost.’ I cannot tell how we all came out of this craze, but the reading world is very susceptible of such lunacies. He is not the only third-rate poet who has been thus apotheosized, before and since. You might have envied his great success, as I certainly did; but it was not success, after all; and I am sure that real success is always difficult to achieve.” “Do you believe that success comes to those who have a special bent or taste, which they cultivate by hard work?” “I can only answer that out of my literary experience. For my own part, I believe I have never got any good from a book that I did not read merely because I wanted to read it. I think this may be applied to anything a person does. The book, I know, which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, is apt to yield you little. This, I think, is also true of everything, and the endeavor that does one good,—and lasting good,—is the endeavor one makes with pleasure. Labor done in another spirit will serve in a way, but pleasurable labor brings, on the whole, I think, the greatest reward.” THE REWARDS OF LITERATURE. “You were probably strongly fascinated by the supposed rewards of a literary career?” “Yes. A definite literary ambition grew up in me, and in the long reveries of the afternoon, when I was distributing my case in the printing office, I fashioned a future of overpowering magnificence and undying celebrity. I should be ashamed to say what literary triumphs I achieved in those preposterous deliriums. But I realize now that such dreams are nerving, and sustain one in an otherwise barren struggle.” “Were you ever tempted and willing to abandon your object of a literary life for something else?”