Opium-eater."

Kinglake's beautiful "Eothen" was rewritten half a dozen times before it
was given to a publisher.

Tennyson's song, "Come Into the Garden, Maud," was rewritten some fifty
times before it gave complete satisfaction to the author.

Coming to the gifted Addison, whose diction is full of such grace and
simplicity, so much so as to create envy, yet admiration, in the mind of
every writer who has flourished since his day, we find that the great
author wrote with the most painful deliberation. It is narrated that the
press was stopped again and again, after a whole edition of the
_Spectator_ had been thrown off, in order that its author might make a
slight change in a sentence.

Tom Moore, with all his wonderful brilliancy, considered it doing very
well if he wrote fifty lines of his "Lalla Rookh" in a week.

Hawthorne was slow in composing. Sometimes he wrote only what amounted
to half a dozen pages a week, often only a few lines in the same space
of time, and, alas! he frequently went to his chamber and took up his
pen, only to find himself wholly unable to perform any literary work.

The author of "Pleasures of Hope" was slow of thought, and consequently
his mode of composition was toilsome in the highest degree. He wrote
with extreme caution, weighing and shaping the effect of each
particular line before he permitted it to stand.

Bret Harte, whose creations read as if they had come from his brain
without a flaw or hindrance, showing brilliancy of thought with the
grace of the artist, is still another writer who passes days and weeks
on a short story or poem before he is ready to deliver it into the hands
of the printer. So it was with Bryant. Though in reality the sum total
of his poetry might be included in a small volume, so few are his
lyrics, we cannot fail to be impressed with the truth of the statement
when we are told that even these few gems of verse cost our late
Wordsworth hard toil to bring into being, and endow with the splendor of
immortality.

Bernardine de St. Pierre copied his sweet and beautiful "Paul and
Virginia" nine times to make it more perfect.

Beranger _composait toutes ses chansons dans sa tete_. "Once made, I
committed them to writing in order to forget them," he said. He tells of
having dreamt for ten years of a song about the taxes that weigh down
the rural population. In vain he tapped his brain-pan,--nothing came of
it. But one night he awoke with the air and the r