What need to tell me that I possessed a power that inflamed every
vein, that heated all the blood in my system, that filled, till they
seemed buoyant, every cell of my brain? As much need as to tell the
expectant mother she has a life within her own.

I was tired of praise, tired of being called gifted, tired of
hearing reiterated by others that which I knew so well myself.

We are invariably little grateful for anything freely and constantly
offered to us, and I cared now simply nothing for compliments,
praise, or felicitation.

These had been given to me from my childhood upwards, and yet here,
at six and twenty, I was still unknown, unrecognized, obscure, and
not a single line of my writing had met the public eye.

I craved and thirsted after success far more than a fever-stricken
man in the desert can crave after water, for the longings and
desires of the body are finite, and when a fixed pitch in them has
been surpassed, death grants us a merciful cessation of all desire,
but the longings of the mind are infinite, absolutely without limit
and without period; and where a physical desire, ungratified, must
eventually destroy itself as it wears away the matter that has given
it birth, a mental desire does not wane with the flesh it wastes,
but remains ravening to the last, and reigns supreme over the death
agony, up to the final moment of actual dissolution.

I had done what I could to attain my own wishes; I was not one of
those idle, clever fellows who imagine talent independent of work,
and who are too lazy to throw into words and commit to paper the