I never had any report of the book's sales, but I believe my _Life of
Lincoln_ sold very well in the West, though in the East it was
forestalled by the books of writers better known. In the quiet which
followed with a business which is always tending to quiescence (if the
mood of the trade when discouraging authors may be trusted) my young
publisher suggested my taking one hundred and seventy-five dollars of my
money, and going to Canada and New England and New York on a sort of
roving commission for another work he had imagined. It was to be a
subscription book reporting the state and describing the operation of
the principal manufacturing industries, and he thought it an enterprise
peculiarly suited to my powers. I did not think so, but I was eager to
see the world, especially the world of Boston, and I gladly took my
hundred and seventy-five dollars and started, intending to do my best
for the enterprise, though inwardly abhorring it. The best I could do
was to try seeing the inner working of an iron foundry in Portland,
where I was suspected of designs upon the proprietorial processes and
refused admission; and I made no attempt to surprise the secrets of
other manufacturers. But I saw Niagara Falls, which did not withhold its
glories from me in fear of the publicity which I gave them in my letters
to the Cincinnati _Gazette_; and I saw the St. Lawrence River and
Montreal and Quebec, with the _habitant_ villages round about them. I
also saw the ocean at Portland (not so jealous of its mysteries as the
iron foundry); I saw Boston and Cambridge, and Lowell and Holmes, and
their publisher, Fields; I saw New York and Walt Whitman, and the Hudson
River. This has been fully told in my _Literary Friends and
Acquaintance_, and need not be told again here; but what may be
fittingly set down is that when I arrived home in Columbus I found the
publishing business still quieter than I had left it, and my friend with
no enterprise in hand which I could help him bring to a successful or
even unsuccessful issue. In fact he had nothing for me to do in that
hour of mounting political excitement, and this did not surprise me.
Neither did it surprise me that my old chief of the _State Journal_
should ask me to rejoin him, though it did greatly rejoice me. He was
yet in that kind illusion of his that he was working too hard on the
paper; he expressed his fear that in the demand made upon his time by
public affairs he should not be able to give it the attention he would
like, and he proposed that I should return to a wider field in it, on an
increased wage; he also intimated that he should now be able to bring up
my arrears of salary, and he quite presently did so.
Again I was at the work which I was always so happy in, and I found
myself associated in it on equal terms with a man much nearer my own age
than my former associate Reed was. My new fellow-journalist had come to
our chief from his own region in northwestern Ohio; I do not know but
from his old newspaper there. I cannot write the name of Samuel Price
without emotion, so much did I rejoice in our relation to the paper and
each other, with its daily incident and bizarre excitement throughout
the year we were together. I like to bring his looks before me; his
long face with its deep, vertical lines beside the mouth, his black hair
and eyes and smoky complexion; his air very grave mostly, but with an
eager readiness to break into laughter. It seems to me now that our
functions were not very sharply distinguished, though I must have had
charge as before of the literary side of the work. We both wrote leading
editorials, which our chief supervised and censored for a while and then
let go as we wrote them, perhaps finding no great mischief in them. Reed
remained the tradition of the office, and if I had formed myself
somewhat on his mood and manner, Price now formed himself on mine; and
somehow we carried the paper through the year without dishonor or
disaster.
It was that year so memorable to me for having five poems published in
the _Atlantic Monthly_, two of them in the same number, and I must have
been strongly confirmed in my purpose of being a poet. Of course I knew
too much of the world, and the literary world, to imagine that I could
at once make a living by poetry, but I probably expected to live by some
other work until my volumes of poetry should accumulate in sufficient
number and sell in sufficient quantity to support me without the aid of
prose. As yet I had no expectation of writing fiction; I had not
recovered from the all-but-mortal blow dealt my hopes in the failure of
that story which I had begun printing in my father's newspaper before I
had imagined an ending for it, though I must for several years have been
working in stolen moments at another story of village life, which I
vainly offered to the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the _Knickerbocker
Magazine_, and after that for many years tried to get some publisher to
bring out as a book. The manuscript must still somewhere exist, and I
should not be surprised, if I ever found it, to find myself respecting
it for a certain helpless reality in its dealing with the conditions I
knew best when I began writing it. But it was still to be nearly ten
years before I tried anything else of the sort, and even in _Their
Wedding Journey_, which was my next attempt, I helped myself out with
travel-adventure in carrying forward a slender thread of narrative.
Every now and then, however, I wrote some sketch or study, which I
printed in our newspaper, where also I printed pieces of verse, too
careless or too slight to be hopefully offered for publication in the
East.