even now I do not understand the faculty of composition; but this I do know, that the history of the circumstances under which most books are written would be a frightful picture of human suffering. How often is the pen taken up when the hand is unsteady with recent sickness, and bodily pain is struggled against, and sometimes in vain! How often is the page written hurriedly and anxiously,—the mind fevered the while by the consciousness that it is not doing justice to its powers! and yet a certain quantity of work must be completed, to meet the exigences of that poverty which has no other resource. But there is an evil beyond all this. When the iron of some settled sorrow has entered into the soul,—when some actual image is predominant even in the world of imagination, and the thoughts, do what you will, run in one only channel,—composition is then a perpetual struggle, broken by the one recurring cry, "Hast thou found me, oh! mine enemy?" Something or other is forever bringing up the one idea: it colours every day more and more the creations
