at has lain
beneath her bosom and been nourished from her heart; and now that my
book is to leave me, it is a part of myself that goes into the world of
men.

And now I shall pass vague and dreary days, until the seed of life
again quickens within me, and till I know again that I have conceived
another creature of the mind. Dreary days, because the mind, relieved
of its sweet toil, flaps loose and slack like a drooping sail. I am
weary, too, not with a pleasant physical weariness, but with the
weariness of one who has spent a part of life too swiftly. For the joy
of such work as mine is so great that there seems nothing like it in
the world; and the hours are vain and listless that are not so
comforted. Now I shall make a dozen beginnings, not foreseeing the end,
and I shall abandon them in despair. The beauties of the earth, the
golden sunlight, the crimson close of day, the leaping streams, the
dewy grass will call in vain. Books and talk alike will seem trivial
and meaningless tattle, ministering to nothing.

And then my book will begin to return to me in printed pages. Sometimes
that is a joy, when it seems better than one knew; sometimes it is a
disgust, if one has passed swiftly out of the creative mood; and then
it will be lost to me for a time while it is drest and adorned, to walk
abroad; till it comes back like a stranger in its new guise.

And then comes what is the saddest experience of all; it will pass into
the hands of friends and readers; echoes of it will come back to me, in
talk and print; but it will no longer be the book I knew and loved,
only a part of my past. And this is the hardest thing of all for a
writer, that when others read one's book they take it for the flash of
a present mood, while the writer of it will only see in it a pale
reflection of a time long past, and will feel perhaps even farther away
from his book than those who criticise it, however severely. If my book
is criticised as I write it, or directly after I have written it, it is
as though I were myself maltreated; but when it appears so belatedly,
I am often the harshest critic of all, because my whole point of view
may perhaps have shifted, and I may be no longer the man who wrote the
book, but a man of larger experience, who can judge perhaps more
securely than any one else how far behind life the book lags. There is
no season in the world in which the mind travels faster from its
standpoint than when it has finished a book