alf a library to write one book.
When an authoress told Wordsworth she had spent six hours on a poem, he
replied that he would have spent six weeks. Think of Bishop Hall
spending thirty years on one of his works! Owens was working on the
"Commentary to the Epistle to the Hebrews" for twenty years. Moore
spent several weeks on one of his musical stanzas which reads as if it
were a dash of genius.

Carlyle wrote with the utmost difficulty and never executed a page of
his great histories till he had consulted every known authority, so
that every sentence is the quintessence of many books, the product of
many hours of drudging research in the great libraries. Today, "Sartor
Resartus" is everywhere. You can get it for a mere trifle at almost
any bookseller's, and hundreds of thousands of copies are scattered
over the world. But when Carlyle brought it to London in 1851, it was
refused almost contemptuously by three prominent publishers. At length
he managed to get it into "Fraser's Magazine," the editor of which
conveyed to the author the pleasing information that his work had been
received with "unqualified disapprobation."

Henry Ward Beecher sent half a dozen articles to the publisher of a
religious paper to pay for his subscription, but they were respectfully
declined. The publishers of the "Atlantic Monthly" returned Miss
Alcott's manuscript, suggesting that she had better stick to teaching.
One of the leading magazines ridiculed Tennyson's first poems, and
consigned the young poet to temporary oblivion. Only one of Ralph
Waldo Emerson's books had a remunerative sale. Washington Irving was
nearly seventy years old before the income from his books paid the
expenses of his household.

In some respects it is very unfortunate that the old system of binding
boys out to a trade has been abandoned. To-day very few boys learn any
trade. They pick up what they know, as they go along, just as a
student crams for a particular examination, just to "get through,"
without any effort to see how much he may learn on any subject.

Think of an American youth spending ten years with Da Vinci on the
model of an equestrian statue that he might master the anatomy of the
horse! Most young American artists would expect, in a quarter of that
time, to sculpture an Apollo Belvidere.

A rich man asked Howard Burnett to do a little something for his album.
Burnett complied and charged a thousand francs. "But it took you only
fiv