1 January 1869 • Cleveland, Ohio (MS: Davis, UCCL 00216)
While they get the carriage ready (for I am with my dear old ad Quaker City adopted mother,)2explanatory note—for we are going out to pay New Year’s calls, I will snatch a moment to say I have just received yours. And along with it a handful of dainty letters from that wonderful miracle of humanity, little Miss Livy. She Ⓐemendation has a most engaging commercial reliability & promptness allied to her stately commercial style of correspondence. I can always depend on an 8-page letter, every day. Never any whining in it, or any nonsense, but wisdom till you can’t rest. Never any foolishness—but whenever she does miss fire & drop herself into her epistle accidentally, it is perfectly gorgeous. She thinks about me all the time, & informs me of it with Miltonic ponderosity of diction. She loves me, & conveys the fact with the awful dignity of an Ambassador construing an article of international law. But in her sermons she excels. They are full of a simple trust & confidence, & touched with a natural pathos, that would win a savage. Ours is a funny correspondence, & a mighty satisfactory one, altogether. Mine My letters are an ocean of love in a storm—hers an ocean of love in the majestic repose of a great calm. But the waters are the same—just the same, my boy.3explanatory note
And I have delightful Christmas letters, this morning, from her mother & father—full of love & trust.4explanatory note The Ⓐemendation Lo! the world is very beautiful—very beautiful—& there is a God. I seem to be shaking off the drowsiness of centuries & looking about me half bewildered at the light just bursting above the horizon of an unfamiliar world.
The v carriage waits!5explanatory note Good-bye—love yo to Ⓐemendation you both—God send you a happy New Year that shall continue happy until the year is old again—& forevermore.
Clemens first met Twichell and his wife, Harmony, in October 1868. Almost immediately they became close friends, and even confidants in his courtship of Olivia Langdon ( L2 , 269 n. 3).
On 28 December Clemens arrived at 221 St. Clair Street in Cleveland, where his “adopted mother,” Mary Mason Fairbanks, lived with her husband, Abel Whitmore Fairbanks, and their four children ( L2 , 66–67, 259 n. 1). He remained there through New Year’s Day—except for the evening of 30 December, when he delivered his “American Vandal Abroad” lecture in Akron.
Clemens had characterized Olivia’s letters in a similar way in a 12 December letter to Twichell ( L2 , 331–32). Only one of her courtship letters—written on 13 and 14 November 1869—is known to survive (10 and 11 Nov 69 to OLL, n. 1click to open letter).
All that survives of these letters from Olivia’s parents is the remark quoted in the next letter (p. 3).
The carriage was brought by Cleveland banker Solon Long Severance who, along with his wife, Emily, had become acquainted with Clemens on the Quaker City excursion. On 30 December 1868, Clemens had informed Olivia that “Solon Severance is coming early with a buggy, New Year’s, & we are going to make calls all day long. He knows everybody—& we are going as a Temperance Phalanx, to shed a beneficent influence far & wide over this town!” The next day he told her that Severance would “be after me with a buggy promptly at 11 o’clock” ( L2 , 366, 371).
MS, collection of Chester L. Davis, Jr.
L3 , 1–2; LLMT , 41–42.
This letter, like those of 23 January and 14 February 1869, was evidently later returned to Clemens or his daughter Clara by Twichell or Twichell’s heirs. It survived in the Samossoud Collection at least until 1947: sometime between then and 1949 Dixon Wecter saw it there and had a typescript made. Chester L. Davis, Sr. (1903–87), afterwards acquired the MS directly from Clara Clemens Samossoud (see Samossoud Collection, p. 586). In 1991 it was sold to an unknown purchaser (Christie 1991, lot 83).