see what my
native soil would do toward drawing it out. So I took to writing on all
manner of rural themes--sugar-making, cows, haying, stone walls. These,
no doubt, helped to draw out the rank suggestion of Emerson. I wrote
about things of which I knew, and was, therefore, bound to be more
sincere with myself than in writing upon the Emersonian themes. When a
man tells what he knows, what he has seen or felt, he is pretty sure to
be himself. When I wrote upon more purely intellectual themes, as I
did about this time for the "Leader," the Emersonian influence was more
potent, though less so than in the first "Atlantic" essay.

Any man progresses in the formation of a style of his own in proportion
as he gets down to his own real thoughts and feelings, and ceases to
echo the thoughts and moods of another. Only thus can he be sincere; and
sincerity is the main secret of style. What I wrote from "the push of
reading," as Whitman calls it, was largely an artificial product; I had
not made it my own; but when I wrote of country scenes and experiences,
I touched the quick of my mind, and it was more easy to be real and
natural.

I also wrote in 1860 or 1861 a number of things for the "Saturday Press"
which exhaled the Emersonian perfume. If you will look them over,
you will see how my mind was working in the leading-strings of
Analogy--often a forced and unreal Analogy.

December, 1907

My Dear Friend,--

You ask me to tell you more about myself, my life, how it has been with
me, etc. It is an inviting subject. How an old man likes to run on about
himself!

I see that my life has been more of a holiday than most persons', much
more than was my father's or his father's. I have picnicked all along
the way. I have on the whole been gay and satisfied. I have had no great
crosses or burdens to bear; no great afflictions, except such as must
come to all who live; neither poverty, nor riches. I have had uniform
good health, true friends, and some congenial companions. I have done,
for the most part, what I wanted to do. Some drudgery I have had, that
is, in uncongenial work on the farm, in teaching, in clerking, and in
bank-examining; but amid all these things I have kept an outlook, an
open door, as it were, out into the free fields of nature, and a buoyant
feeling that I would soon be there.

My farm life as a boy was at least a half-holiday. The fishing, the
hunting, the berrying, the Sundays on the hills or in the wo