on the
blank unfinished paper. I can write fast enough now. Am I better than I
was then? oh, no! One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being
able to express it, is worth all the fluency and flippancy in the world."
This regretful looking back to the past, when emotions were keen and
sharp, and when thought wore the novel dress of a stranger, and this
dissatisfaction with the acquirements of the present, is common enough
with the man of letters. The years have come and gone, and he is
conscious that he is not intrinsically richer,--he has only learned to
assort and display his riches to advantage. His wares have neither
increased in quantity nor improved in quality,--he has only procured a
window in a leading thoroughfare. He can catch his butterflies more
cunningly, he can pin them on his cards more skilfully, but their wings
are fingered and tawdry compared with the time when they winnowed before
him in the sunshine over the meadows of youth. This species of regret is
peculiar to the class of which I am speaking, and they often discern
failure in what the world counts success. The veteran does not look back
to the time when he was in the awkward squad; the accountant does not
sigh over the time when he was bewildered by the mysteries of
double-entry. And the reason is obvious. The dexterity which time and
practice have brought to the soldier and the accountant is pure gain: the
dexterity of expression which time and practice have brought to the
writer is gain too, in its way, but not quite so pure. It may have been
cultivated and brought to its degree of excellence at the expense of
higher things. The man of letters lives by thought and expression, and
his two powers may not be perfectly balanced. And, putting aside its
effect on the reader, and through that, on the writer's pecuniary
prosperity, the tragedy of want of equipoise lies in this. When the
writer expresses his thought, it is immediately dead to him, however
life-giving it may be to others; he pauses midway in his career, he looks
back over his uttered past--brown desert to him, in which there is no
sustenance--he looks forward to the green _un_uttered future, and
beholding its narrow limits, knows it is all that he can call his
own,--on that vivid strip he must pasture his intellectual life.

Is the literary life, on the whole, a happy one? Granted that the writer
is productive, that he possesses abundance of material, that he has