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With Family at Quarry Farm
Courtesy Mark Twain House, Hartford |
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184th Letter to Olivia,
January 20, 1870
Courtesy of The Mark Twain Project,
Bancroft Library, Berkeley |
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“She 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...She thinks about me all the time and informs me with Miltonic ponderousity of diction. She loves me, & conveys the fact with the awful dignity of an Ambassador construing an article of international law...Ours is a funny correspondence, & a mighty satisfactory one, altogether. 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.”—Mark Twain, Letter to Joe Twichell, 1869
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Letter to Olivia
Courtesy of The Mark Twain Project,
Bancroft Library, Berkeley |
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“I haven’t anything to write, Livy, but then I love you so much that I must find some sort of escape for it or perish. It is an old story to keep telling you that I love you, Livy, but then I do love you, Livy, & I must say it & so you must put up with it my darling. But you are a patient little martyr to everybody, & you can bear it.”—Mark Twain, Letter to Olivia Langdon, 1869
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Olivia Clemens
Courtesy of The Mark Twain House,
Hartford |
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