when I abandoned myself in luxurious case to my writing, till the drowsy clock struck the small hours of the morning.  Then another chapter is all scented with the breath of roses, that stole into my windows on a still summer evening; at another point the page is almost streaked and stained for me with the sorrowful tidings which came to me in the middle of a sentence; when I took up my writing again some days after, it seemed as though there was a deep trench between me and my former self.  And again another chapter was written in all the glow of a beautiful and joyful experience, in a day of serene gladness which made me feel that it was worth while to have lived, even if the world should hold nothing else that was happy for me.

Thus, then, and thus has my life transferred itself to these pages, till they are all full for me of joy and sorrow, of experience and delight, I suppose that a painter or a musician have the same tenderness about their work, though it seems to me impossible that their life can have so flowed into picture or song as my life has flowed into my book.  The painter has had to transcribe what he sees, the musician to capture the delicate intervals that have thrilled his inner ear—­but if the painter’s thought has been absorbed in the forms that he is depicting, if the musician has lost himself among the airy harmonies, the sweet progressions, these things must have drawn them away from life, and secluded them in a paradise of emotion; but with me it has been different; for it is life itself that has palpitated in my pages, my very heart’s blood has been driven by eager pulsations through sentence and phrase; and the book is thus a part of myself in a way in which no picture and no melody can be.  I have something, I think, of the joy of the mother over her child, the child that has lain beneath her bosom and been nourished from her heart; and now that my book is to leave me, it is a part of myself that goes into the world of men.

And now I shall pass vague and dreary days, until the seed of life again quickens within me, and till I know again that I have conceived another creature of the mind.  Dreary days, because the mind, relieved of its sweet toil, flaps loose and slack like a drooping sail.  I am weary, too, not with a pleasant physical weariness, but with the weariness of one who has spent a part of life too swiftly.  For the joy of such work as mine is so great that there seems nothing like it in the world; and the hours are vain and listless that are not so comforted.  Now I shall make a dozen beginnings, not foreseeing the end, and I shall abandon them in despair.  The beauties of the earth, the golden sunlight, the crimson close of day, the leaping streams, the dewy grass will call in vain.  Books and talk alike will seem trivial and meaningless tattle, ministering to nothing.

And then my book will begin to return to me in printed pages.  Sometimes that is a joy, when it seems better than one knew; sometimes it is a disgust, if one has passed swiftly out of the creative mood; and then it will be lost to me for a time while it is drest and adorned, to walk abroad; till it comes back like a stranger in its new guise.