Those are feeble words. If this were a book, I would tear it all up.
I wonder if any one will ever read this. As a matter of fact, I suppose ten people will read gossip about the book for every one who reads the book.
This is just a month from the beginning. A month to-day! Yes—I have done my share, I have done a third of it—a third!
But the end is so much harder!
May 9th.
I have been for two days in the mire. I was disturbed, and then I was sluggish. Oh, the sluggishness of my nature!
If ever I am a great poet, I will have made myself that by the power of my will; that is a fact. I am by nature a great clod—I feel nothing, I care about nothing. I look at the flowers as a cow chewing its cud.—It is only that I will to do right.
Sometimes the sight of my dulness drives me wild. Then again I merely gaze at it. I try time and again to get my mind on my work, and something—anything, provided it is trivial enough—turns me aside. Just now I saw a spider-web, and that made me think of Bruce, and thence I went by way of Walter Scott to Palestine, and when I came to I was writing a song for—who was the minstrel?—to sing outside of the prison of Coeur de Lion.