the time. But any one who has ever tried creative work gets filled
with a nauseating disgust for making books out of other people's
writings, and constructing a kind of resurrection-pie out of the
shreds. Moreover I know nothing except literature; I could only
write a literary biography; and it has always seemed to me a
painful irony that men who have put into their writings what other
people put into deeds and acts should be the very people whose
lives are sedulously written and rewritten, generation after
generation. The instinct is natural enough. The vivid memories of
statesmen and generals fade; but as long as we have the fascinating
and adorable reveries of great spirits, we are consumed with a
desire to reconstruct their surroundings, that we may learn where
they found their inspiration. A great poet, a great imaginative
writer, so glorifies and irradiates the scene in which his mighty
thoughts came to him, that we cannot help fancying that the secret
lies in crag and hill and lake, rather than in the mind that
gathered in the common joy. I have a passion for visiting the
haunts of genius, but rather because they teach me that inspiration
lies everywhere, if we can but perceive it, than because I hope to
detect where the particular charm lay. And so I am driven back upon
my own poor imagination. I say to myself, like Samson, "I will go
out as at other times before, and shake myself," and then the end
of the verse falls on me like a shadow--"and he wist not that the
Lord was departed from him."



January 18, 1889.