July 2 Sunday – Emilie R. Rogers (Mrs. H.H. Rogers) wrote from New Bedford, MASS. To Sam, having rec’d his note on July 1. They had just come from Boston the day before and would return this afternoon, as Mr. Rogers had to take the stand in a lawsuit; they might have to stay all week, and were at the Hotel Lorraine if Sam stopped on his way to Norfolk, Conn. To see Clara [MTHHR 588].
July 1 Saturday – John Milton Hay (1838-1905) died this day. In Dublin, N.H. Sam sent a telegram to the N.Y. American:
I am deeply grieved & I mourn with the nation—this loss is irreparable. My friendship with Mr. Hay & my admiration of him endured 38 years without impairment. / Mark Twain [MTP: Cummings file]. Note: See Sam’s note sent anonymously under 1905 entries.
Isabel Lyon’s journal: This evening a telegram came from the N.Y. American asking Mr. Clemens to telegraph them something on the death of Mr. Hay.
July – Harper’s Monthly published Sam’s article “William Dean Howells” p. 803-6. Clemens chose an excerpt from Howells’ “Easy Chair” column, a paragraph concerned with Louis Dyer’s Machiavelli and the Modern State (1904) to show “how clear, how limpid, how understandable” is Howells’ prose [Gribben 331]. Note: see Lyon’s journal entries for Mar. 26, 29, Apr. 5 on the writing of this article.
June 30 Friday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote to Hamlin Garland.
June 29 Thursday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote to daughter Clara in Norfolk, Conn.
Ah dear heart, I am very sorry you are not going to be able to sing the Two Grenadiers BUT I shan’t be sorry if you are with us instead of out on the concert stage singing for strangers.
Yes, my bronchial affection is in a sense permanent: my port lung got a permanent damage in Berlin, & if I should catch 500 colds they would all be followed by bronchitis.
June 28 Wednesday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote to H.H. Rogers.
This is a line to say there’s a report in Norfolk, Conn. (which we are doing what we can to keep out of the papers) that Clara’s horse has been running away with her. It isn’t so. It was her horse, but she wasn’t in the carriage.
Jean & I expect to go see Clara in a few days—as soon as we get a permit from the doctor, which may come any day now. It is pretty cold weather here, but we don’t mind it.
With warm regards to both of you [MTHHR 587-8].
June 27 Tuesday – Isabel Lyon’s journal: All day I’ve been weak with the wonder of that poem [See June 26 journal]. Mr. Clemens made some corrections in it and then let me take it— to read and read this morning. Later he came down stairs and talked about the kind of woman Mrs. Howells is. I’d just been saying that according to the way that Mr. Howells has depicted womankind in “Miss Billard’s Inspiration” [sic] he must have either an enchanting wife, or an utterly inconsequential one, and I think it is probably the latter, but there is that inconsequential side to every woman anyway.
June 26 Monday – Sam wrote the poem “Apostrophe to Death,” not published in his lifetime:
O Death, O sweet & gracious friend,
I bare my smitten head to Thee, & at thy sacred feet
I set my life’s extinguished lamp & lay my bruised heart
[Tuckey, “The ‘Me’ and the Machine” 135; Scott, Poetry MT 126-7]. Note: Hill gives the title as “An Invocation to Death” (as does Miss Lyon in the entry below) and notes that Sam read the poem to the “cozy group around the fire, and the next day Miss Lyon was ‘weak with the wonder of that poem’ all day long” [110].
June 25 Sunday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote to Frederick A. Duneka.
June 24 Saturday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote to Joe Twichell. After several pages of bile dumped about Theodore Roosevelt, though he believed “praise & blame” were “unwarrantable terms when applied to coffee-mills”—in other words, man has no more control over his acts than a coffee-mill—Sam wrote of his work and daughters:
I began a new book here in this enchanting solitude 35 days ago. I have done 33 full days’ work on it. To-day I have not worked. There was another day in this present month wherein I did not work—you will know that date without my telling you.