No other business
offers a man his daily bread upon such joyful terms. The soldier
and the explorer have moments of a worthier excitement, but they
are purchased by cruel hardships and periods of tedium that beggar
language. In the life of the artist there need be no hour without
its pleasure. I take the author, with whose career I am best
acquainted; and it is true he works in a rebellious material, and
that the act of writing is cramped and trying both to the eyes and
the temper; but remark him in his study, when matter crowds upon
him and words are not wanting - in what a continual series of small
successes time flows by; with what a sense of power as of one
moving mountains, he marshals his petty characters; with what
pleasures, both of the ear and eye, he sees his airy structure
growing on the page; and how he labours in a craft to which the
whole material of his life is tributary, and which opens a door to
all his tastes, his loves, his hatreds, and his convictions, so
that what he writes is only what he longed to utter. He may have
enjoyed many things in this big, tragic playground of the world;
but what shall he have enjoyed more fully than a morning of
successful work? Suppose it ill paid: the wonder is it should be
paid at all.
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