loser than my shadow, until it has become a real thing, a being, a
friend, like myself but yet not quite myself.

And then my book, as I read it through for the last time, is all full
of gentle and tender associations. This chapter brings back to me a day
of fierce wind and blustering rain, when I walked by sodden roads and
whistling hedges in my oldest clothes, till they hung heavily about me
and creaked as I moved; the thought of the chapter came to me, I
remember, when I decided that I had been far enough for health and even
for glory, and when I fled back before the hooligan wind; then followed
a long, quiet, firelit evening when I abandoned myself in luxurious
case to my writing, till the drowsy clock struck the small hours of the
morning. Then another chapter is all scented with the breath of roses,
that stole into my windows on a still summer evening; at another point
the page is almost streaked and stained for me with the sorrowful
tidings which came to me in the middle of a sentence; when I took up my
writing again some days after, it seemed as though there was a deep
trench between me and my former self. And again another chapter was
written in all the glow of a beautiful and joyful experience, in a day
of serene gladness which made me feel that it was worth while to have
lived, even if the world should hold nothing else that was happy for
me.

Thus, then, and thus has my life transferred itself to these pages,
till they are all full for me of joy and sorrow, of experience and
delight, I suppose that a painter or a musician have the same
tenderness about their work, though it seems to me impossible that
their life can have so flowed into picture or song as my life has
flowed into my book. The painter has had to transcribe what he sees,
the musician to capture the delicate intervals that have thrilled his
inner ear--but if the painter's thought has been absorbed in the forms
that he is depicting, if the musician has lost himself among the airy
harmonies, the sweet progressions, these things must have drawn them
away from life, and secluded them in a paradise of emotion; but with me
it has been different; for it is life itself that has palpitated in my
pages, my very heart's blood has been driven by eager pulsations
through sentence and phrase; and the book is thus a part of myself in a
way in which no picture and no melody can be. I have something, I
think, of the joy of the mother over her child, the child th