Havana cigar, a glass of first-class
wine, or a cup of strong coffee are agreeable to him. When dictating, he
is in the habit of lying on a sofa or walking slowly up and down the
room. The poet makes it a rule not to write unless disposed to.

Gray found fault with Mason for fancying he should succeed best by
writing hastily in the first fervors of his imaginations, and,
therefore, never waiting for epithets if they did not occur at the time
readily, but leaving spaces for them, and putting them in afterward.
This enervated his poetry, said Gray, and he says the same thing of the
same method by whomsoever adopted, for nothing is done so well as at the
first concoction. One of Shelley's biographers came upon the poet in a
pine forest, writing verses on a guitar, and, picking up a fragment, saw
a "frightful scrawl," all smear, and smudge, and disorder--such a
dashed-off daub as conceited artists are apt to mistake for genius.
Shelley said: "When my brain gets heated with thought, it soon boils,
and throws off images and words faster than I can skim them off. In the
morning, when cooled down, out of that rude sketch, as you justly call
it, I shall attempt a drawing."

IV.

Influence upon Writers of Time and Place.

Nathaniel Hawthorne made innumerable notes of every fleeting, quaint
fancy, strange anecdote, or eccentric person. These notes he afterward
worked into his stories. Julian Hawthorne, his son, states in the
_Century Magazine_: "The new husband and wife, Adam and Eve, as they
liked to call themselves, were almost as poor in money as their
prototypes, and in spite of their orchard and their vegetable garden, a
good deal less able to get on without occasional remittances.
Accordingly, the future author of the 'Scarlet Letter' was compelled to
alternate his hoeing and digging, his rambles over the hills and his
paddling on the river, with periods of application to pen and paper in
his study, where he would sit with locked doors, clad in a long and
ancient flowered dressing-gown, upon the lining of the left-hand skirt
of which he was in the habit of wiping his pen. His wife noticed this
habit, and said nothing about it; but one day, on bringing his pen to
the accustomed spot, Hawthorne found stitched on there a pretty
pen-wiper, in the shape of a butterfly with red and black wings, and
this butterfly was ever after renewed from time to time, as necessity
required. What was written in that little sunny-hue