And then I would sit down and ponder over the various scenes and adventures in my book,endeavouring to ascertain how I came originally to devise them,and by dint of reflecting I remembered that to a single word in conversation,or some simple accident in a street or on a road,I was indebted for some of the happiest portions of my work;they were but tiny seeds,it is true,which in the soil of my imagination had subsequently become stately trees,but I reflected that without them no stately trees would have been produced,and that,consequently,only a part in the merit of these compositions which charmed the world-for the did charm the world-was due to myself.Thus,a dead fly was in my phial,poisoning all the pleasure which I should otherwise have derived from the result of my brain-sweat."How hard!"I would exclaim,looking up to the sky,"how hard!I am like Virgil's sheep,bearing fleeces not for themselves."But,not to tire you,it fared with my second work as it did with my first;I flung it aside,and,in order to forget it,I began a third,on which I am now occupied;but the difficulty of writing it is immense,my extreme desire to be original sadly cramping the powers of my mind;my fastidiousness being so great that I invariably reject whatever ideas I do not think to be legitimately my own.But there is one circumstance to which I cannot help alluding here,as it serves to show what miseries this love of originality must needs bring upon an author.
I am constantly discovering that,however original I may wish to be,I am continually producing the same things which other people say or write.Whenever,after producing something which gives me perfect satisfaction,and which has cost me perhaps days and nights of brooding,I chance to take up a book for the sake of a little relaxation,a book which I never saw before,I am sure to find in it something more or less resembling some part of what I have been just composing.You will easily conceive the distress which then comes over me;'tis then that I am almost tempted to execrate the chance which,by discovering my latent powers,induced me to adopt a profession of such anxiety and misery.