Just this side of the city is the monstrous arms factory; and over the
level line of its great dike, the chimneys of the attendant village of
boarding-houses peep up like irregular teeth. A sail-boat glides up the
river. A silent brown sparrow runs along the stems of the willow
thicket, and delicate slender flies now and then alight on me. They will
die to-night. It is too early in the spring for them.

The air is warm and soft. Now, and here, I can write. Utter solitude,
warmth, a landscape, and a comfortable seat are the requisites. The
first and the last are the chiefest; if but one of the four could be
had, I think that (as a writer) I should take the seat. That which, of
all my writing, I wrote with the fullest and keenest sense of creative
pleasure, I did while coiled up, one summer day, among the dry branches
of a fallen tree, at the tip of a long, promontory-like stretch of
meadow, on the quiet, lonely, level Glastenbury shore, over against the
Connecticut State Prison at Wethersfield.

Well, here on the river-shore, I begin; but I shall not tell when I
stop. Doubtless there will be a jog in the composition. The blue sky and
clear water will fade out of my words all at once, and a carpet and
hot-air furnace, perhaps, will appear.

* * * * *

Nothing.

Then, a life. And so I entered this world: a being, sliding obscurely in
among human beings. But whence, or whither? Those questions belong among
the gigantic, terrible ones, insoluble, silent,--the unanswering
primeval sphinxes of the mind. We can sit and stare at such questions,
and wonder; but staring and wondering are not thought. They are close to
idiocy: both states drop the lower jaw and open the mouth; and assuming
the idiotic _physique_ tends, if there be any sympathetic and imitative
power, to bring on the idiotic state. If we stare and wonder too long at
such questions, we may make ourselves idiots,--never philosophers.

I do not recollect the innocent and sunny hours of childhood.[A] As to
innocence, the remark of a certain ancient and reverend man, though
sour, was critically accurate,--that "it is the weakness of infants'
limbs, and not their minds, which are innocent." It is most true. Many
an impotent infantine screech or slap or scratch embodies an abandonment
and ecstasy of utter uncontrolled fury scarcely expressible by the
grown-up man, though he should work the bloodiest murder to express it.
And what ad