rambles and excursions. What was mine, what I saw with love and
emotion, has always fused with my mind, so that in the heat of writing
it came back to me spontaneously. What I have lived, I never lose.

My trip to Alaska came near being spoiled because I was expected to
write it up, and actually did so from day to day, before fusion and
absorption had really taken place. Hence my readers complain that they
do not find me in that narrative, do not find my stamp or quality as in
my other writings. And well they may say it. I am conscious that I am
not there as in the others; the fruit was plucked before it had ripened;
or, to use my favorite analogy, the bee did not carry the nectar long
enough to transform it into honey. Had I experienced a more free and
disinterested intercourse with Alaskan nature, with all the pores of my
mind open, the result would certainly have been different. I might then,
after the experience had lain and ripened in my mind for a year or two,
and become my own, have got myself into it.

When I went to the Yellowstone National Park with President Roosevelt,
I waited over three years before writing up the trip. I recall the
President's asking me at the time if I took notes. I said, "No;
everything that interests me will stick to me like a burr." And I may
say here that I have put nothing in my writings at any time that did not
interest me. I have aimed in this to please myself alone. I believe it
to be true at all times that what does not interest the writer will not
interest his reader.

From the impromptu character of my writings come both their merits
and their defects--their fresh, unstudied character, and their want
of thoroughness and reference-book authority. I cannot, either in
my writing or in my reading, tolerate any delay, any flagging of the
interest, any beating about the bush, even if there is a bird in it. The
thought, the description, must move right along, and I am impatient of
all footnotes and quotations and asides.

A writer may easily take too much thought about his style, until it
obtrudes itself upon the reader's attention. I would have my sentences
appear as if they had never taken a moment's thought of themselves, nor
stood before the study looking-glass an instant. In fact, the less a
book appears written, the more like a spontaneous product it is, the
better I like it. This is not a justification of carelessness or haste;
it is a plea for directness, vitality, motion.