iginate 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 difficulty of writing it is immense, my extreme desire
to be original sadly cramping the powers of my mind; my fastidiousness
being so great that I invariably reject whatever ideas I do not think to
be legitimately my own. But there is one circumstance to which I cannot
help alluding here, as it serves to show what miseries this love of
originality must needs bring upon an author. I am constantly discovering
that, however original I may wish to be, I am continually producing the
same things which other people say or write. Wheneve