ld 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. Whenever, after producing
something which gives me perfect satisfaction, and which has cost me
perhaps days and nights of brooding, I chance to take up a book for the
sake of a little relaxation, a book which I never saw before, I am sure
to find in it something more or less resembling some part of what I have
been just composing. You will easily conceive the distress which then
comes over me; 'tis then that I am almost tempted to execrate the chance
which, by discovering my latent powers, induced me to adopt a profession
of such anxiety and misery.

'For some time past I have given up reading almost entirely, owing to the
dread which I entertain of lighting upon something similar to what I
myself have written. I scarcely ever transgress without having almost
instant reason to repent. To-day, when I took up the newspa