imperfections, when--and I shake
when I mention it--the same kind of idea which perplexed me with regard
to the hawks and the Gypsy pony rushed into my mind, and I forthwith
commenced touching the objects around me, in order to baffle the evil
chance, as you call it; it was neither more nor less than a doubt of the
legality of my claim to the thoughts, expressions, and situations
contained in the book; that is, to all that constituted the book. How
did I get them? How did they come into my mind? Did I invent them? Did
they originate with myself? Are they my own, or are they some other
body's? You see into what difficulty I had got; I won't trouble you by
relating all that I endured at that time, but will merely say that after
eating my own heart, as the Italians say, and touching every object that
came in my way for six months, I at length flung my book, I mean the copy
of it which I possessed, into the fire, and began another.

"But it was all in vain; I laboured at this other, finished it, and gave
it to the world; and no sooner had I done so, than the same thought was
busy in my brain, poisoning all the pleasure which I should otherwise
have derived from my work. How did I get all the matter which composed
it? Out of my own mind, unquestionably; but how did it come there--was
it the indigenous growth of the mind? And then I would sit down and
ponder over the various scenes and adventures in my book, endeavouring to
ascertain how I came originally to devise them, and by dint of reflecting
I remembered that to a single word in conversation, or some simple
accident in a street, or on a road, I was indebted for some of the
happiest portions of my work; they were but tiny seeds, it is true, which
in the soil of my imagination had subsequently become stately trees, but
I reflected that without them no stately trees would have been produced,
and that, consequently, only a part in the merit of these compositions
which charmed the world--for they did charm the world--was due to myself.
Thus, a dead fly was in my phial, poisoning all the pleasure which I
should otherwise have derived from the result of my brain sweat. 'How
hard!' I would exclaim, looking up to the sky, 'how hard! I am like
Virgil's sheep, bearing fleeces not for themselves.' But, not to tire
you, it fared with my second work as it did with my first; I flung it
aside, and, in order to forget it, I began a third, on which I am now
occupied; but the di