t of the
idea of a man imprisoned for ten or fifteen years; his imprisonment
being the gap between the people and circumstances of the first part and
the altered people and circumstances of the second, and his own changed
mind. Though I shall probably proceed with the Battle idea, I should
like to know what you think of this one?" It was afterwards used in a
modified shape for the _Tale of Two Cities_. "I shall begin the little
story straightway," he wrote a few weeks later; "but I have been dimly
conceiving a very ghostly and wild idea, which I suppose I must now
reserve for the _next_ Christmas book. _Nous verrons._ It will mature in
the streets of Paris by night, as well as in London." This took
ultimately the form of the _Haunted Man_, which was not written until
the winter of 1848. At last I knew that his first slip was done, and
that even his eager busy fancy would not turn him back again.

But other unsatisfied wants and cravings had meanwhile broken out in
him, of which I heard near the close of the second number of _Dombey_.
The first he had finished at the end of July; and the second, which he
began on the 8th of August, he was still at work upon in the first week
of September, when this remarkable announcement came to me. It was his
first detailed confession of what he felt so continuously, and if that
were possible even more strongly, as the years went on, that there is no
single passage in any of his letters which throws such a flood of
illuminative light into the portions of his life which always awaken the
greatest interest. Very much that is to follow must be read by it. "You
can hardly imagine," he wrote on the 30th of August, "what infinite
pains I take, or what extraordinary difficulty I find in getting on
FAST. Invention, thank God, seems the easiest thing in the world; and I
seem to have such a preposterous sense of the ridiculous, after this
long rest" (it was now over two years since the close of _Chuzzlewit_),
"as to be constantly requiring to restrain myself from launching into
extravagances in the height of my enjoyment. But the difficulty of going
at what I call a rapid pace, is prodigious; it is almost an
impossibility. I suppose this is partly the effect of two years' ease,
and partly of the absence of streets and numbers of figures. I can't
express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to
my brain, which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. For a week or a
fortnight I