Recollections of Life in Ohio, from 1813-1840 (1895)

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Recollections of Life in Ohio, from 1813-1840 (1895)

by William Cooper Howells, William Dean Howells (Introduction)

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RECOLLECTIONS OF LIFE IN OHIO, KROM isis TO BY WILLIAM COOPER HOWELLS. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HIS SON, WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. CINCINNATI THE ROBERT CLARKE COMPANY, 1895. WILLIAM COOPER HOWELLS. COPYRIGHT, 1895, BY THE ROBERT CLARKE COMPANY. INTRODUCTION. It was at my suggestion that my father began, ten or twelve years ago, to set down the facts of his early life. At first...moreRECOLLECTIONS OF LIFE IN OHIO, KROM isis TO BY WILLIAM COOPER HOWELLS. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HIS SON, WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. CINCINNATI THE ROBERT CLARKE COMPANY, 1895. WILLIAM COOPER HOWELLS. COPYRIGHT, 1895, BY THE ROBERT CLARKE COMPANY. INTRODUCTION. It was at my suggestion that my father began, ten or twelve years ago, to set down the facts of his early life. At first the record was meant for his family only, but when I came to read it over I found it so full of expe riences and observations of general interest, that I urged him to continue it, with a view to its final publication, and yet keep it as simple and informal as he had origi nally intended. This will account for its appearance and character in the present shape. He was never able to finish it, and the work of revision fell to me after his death. In doing this work I felt that the value of his reminiscences to the public was, of course, in the per spective they afforded of times and conditions long past away, and I have tried to free them from all personalities not essential to this. Necessarily, however, they remain very personal, as far as the writer and his immediate family are concerned. These, indeed, constitute the background of a picture, which could not have had due relief without them. A middle-class English family, coming to Ohio early in the iii iv Introduction. century, could see the primitive American life more or less from the outside. They would be in it, but not of it and their point of view would have distinct advan tages for the study of its peculiarities. My father was always a very close and critical observer, both of nature and of human nature, and I may say that he was equally a lover of both. When Ifirst began to make my ob servations of him, I used to think, with that wisdom of youth which we are not so sure of later, that he was easily deceived in people but I have since come to see that he understood quite well the character of such peo ple, and that what he trusted in them was human na ture, which in the long run did not deceive him. There was that in him which appealed to the better qualities of those he came in contact with, and made them wish to be as good as he thought them capable of being. He was not a poet in tLe artistic sense, but he was a poet in his view of life, the universe, creation and his dream of it included man, as well as the woods and fields and their citizenship. His first emotion concerning every form of life was sympathetic he wished to get upon common ground with every person and with every thing, But he had the philosophic rather than the imagin ative temperament, and what he sometimes thought he wished to do in literature and in art for he used, when young, to write verse and to draw, he would probably not have done if he had enjoyed all those opportunities Introduction. y and advantages which, circumstances denied him. In the things which vitally pleased him, circumstance de nied him nothing. All his long life he had full scope for the contemplation, serene and wise and gentle, to which this world and the world to come wore mostly a hopeful aspect. The real hurt which adverse fortune did him was to make him contented with makeshifts in the material and aesthetic results he aimed at. In the conditions that hampered him through the whole of his childhood and earlier manhood, a makeshift was the ut most he could achieve, and the perfect thing must bealways postponed until the habit of makeshifts became confirmed with him. Consequently, he was not a very good draughtsman, not a very good poet, not a very good farmer, not a very good printer, not a very good editor, according to the several standards of our more settled times but he was the very best man I have ever known. I say this with a full sense of his faults, both of tem perament and of character...(less)

Hardcover, 224 pages

Published by Kessinger Publishing (first published October 17th 2007)

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