he has already had “the important chapter”you have not jumped up at all, and have embraced nothing
And fewer and fewer grow the leaves under your right thumb, and my hope for that embrace becomes fainter and fainter:
“Yes, truly, I reckoned on a tear!”
And you have finished the novel to “where they have met each other,” and you say, yawning—[“that is another expression of true eloquence”]—
“Not muchit is such a book as is often written now-a-days!”
But don’t you know, monster, tiger, European reader! don’t you know that you spent an hour in biting my soul as a tooth-pick; in gnawing and chewing the flesh and bone of your species? Man-eater! my soul was in that which you have ruminated on as once eaten grass. That was my heart that you swallowed there as a dainty bit, for I put my heart and my soul into that book: and so many tears fell on that manuscript, and my blood went back from the veins to the heart, as I wrote on, and I gave you all this; and you bought this for a few pence—and you say “Humph!”
The reader understands that I do not speak here about my book.
So that I will only say, that I quote the words of Abraham Blankaart[1]
- ↑ One of the characters of a Dutch novel much in vogue some fifty years ago.
