difficult as these? They account but little, moreover, I make out,
for W. J.'s eclipses; so that I take refuge easily enough in the memory
of my own pursuits, absorbing enough at times to have excluded other
views. I also plied the pencil, or to be more exact the pen--even if
neither implement critically, rapidly or summarily. I was so often
engaged at that period, it strikes me, in literary--or, to be more
precise in dramatic, accompanied by pictorial composition--that I must
again and again have delightfully lost myself. I had not on any occasion
personally succeeded, amid our theatric strife, in reaching the
footlights; but how could I have doubted, nevertheless, with our large
theatrical experience, of the nature, and of my understanding, of the
dramatic form? I sacrificed to it with devotion--by the aid of certain
quarto sheets of ruled paper bought in Sixth Avenue for the purpose (my
father's store, though I held him a great fancier of the article in
general, supplied but the unruled;) grateful in particular for the happy
provision by which each fourth page of the folded sheet was left blank.
When the drama itself had covered three pages the last one, over which I
most laboured, served for the illustration of what I had verbally
presented. Every scene had thus its explanatory picture, and as each
act--though I am not positively certain I arrived at acts--would have
had its vivid climax. Addicted in that degree to fictive evocation, I
yet recall, on my part, no practice whatever of narrative prose or any
sort of verse. I cherished the "scene"--as I had so vibrated to the idea
of it that evening at Linwood; I thought, I lisped, at any rate I
composed, in scenes; though how much, or how far, the scenes "came" is
another affair. Entrances, exits, the indication of "business," the
animation of dialogue, the multiplication of designated characters, were
things delightful in themselves--while I panted toward the canvas on
which I should fling my figures; which it took me longer to fill than it
had taken me to write what went with it, but which had on the other hand
something of the interest of the dramatist's casting of his _personae_,
and must have helped me to believe in the validity of my subject.

From where on these occasions that subject can have dropped for me I am
at a loss to say, and indeed have a strong impression that I didn't at
any moment quite know what I was writing about: I am sure I couldn't
otherwise h