mile.

What need to tell me that I possessed a power that inflamed every vein,
that heated all the blood in my system, that filled, till they seemed
buoyant, every cell of my brain? As much need as to tell the expectant
mother she has a life within her own.

I was tired of praise, tired of being called gifted, tired of hearing
reiterated by others that which I knew so well myself.

We are invariably little grateful for anything freely and constantly
offered to us, and I cared now simply nothing for compliments, praise,
or felicitation.

These had been given to me from my childhood upwards, and yet here, at
six and twenty, I was still unknown, unrecognized, obscure, and not a
single line of my writing had met the public eye.

I craved and thirsted after success far more than a fever-stricken man
in the desert can crave after water, for the longings and desires of
the body are finite, and when a fixed pitch in them has been surpassed,
death grants us a merciful cessation of all desire, but the longings of
the mind are infinite, absolutely without limit and without period; and
where a physical desire, ungratified, must eventually destroy itself as
it wears away the matter that has given it birth, a mental desire does
not wane with the flesh it wastes, but remains ravening to the last,
and reigns supreme over the death agony, up to the final moment of
actual dissolution.

I had done what I could to attain my own wishes; I was not one of those
idle, clever fellows who imagine talent independent of work, and who
are too lazy to throw into words and commit to paper the brilliant but
vague, unformed inspirations that visit them between the circling rings
of smoke from their cigar.

I had no thought, no expectation, no wish even to be offered that
celebrated sweet condition of the palm without the dust of the struggle
in the arena.

But for me it had been dust, dust, and nothing but dust, and there were
times when it seemed to blind, choke, overpower me.

My capacity for work was unlimited; labour was comparatively no labour
to me. The mechanical work of embodying an idea in a manuscript was as
nothing to me.

To write came to me as naturally as to speak.

Therefore work had not been wanting. Manuscript after manuscript had
been completed, submitted to various publishers, and returned with
thanks, with commendation, and regrets that I had not written something
totally different.

And there they all stood in a pil