I shall have other, and deeper, and kinder reasons also, for what I shall do. What I write in my books must be from my deepest heart, the confession of those moments of which I would speak to no living soul; it must be all my tenderness, and all my rapture, and all my prayer; and do you think it will come easily to me to put that out before the rough world to be stared at, to be bound up in a book and hawked about by commercial people?...
(Here follows in the manuscript the outline of a
plan for publishing the writer's works at cost.)
Would it not be interesting to me, if I could but pierce the future once, and see how long it is destined to be before I do so publish a book! I would do my work better, I fancy, for that.—But let it lie. I shall publish it some day surely, that I know at least.
Sometimes I can hardly realize what it will be to me when I have really won fame, when I can speak the things that so need speaking—and be heard.
May 25th.
Line by line, page by page, I do it. I am counting the days now, wondering—longing.
It is not merely the writing of it, it is the seeing of it—the planning and designing. Sometimes I brood over it for hours—I can not find what I want; and then suddenly a phrase flashes over me and like a train of gunpowder my thought goes running on—leaping, flying; and then the whole thing is plain as day. And I hold it all living in my hands.