species of intoxication amongst your _dramatis
personae_, more largely than is absolutely necessary. Keep them in a
rational state as long as you can. Depend upon it they will not grow
more interesting in proportion as they approximate to madmen or idiots.

And so, dear Eugenius, you are resolved, at all events, in some form or
other, to be the author! This is decided. What was that desperate phrase
I once heard you utter--you would strike one blow, though you put your
whole life into the stroke, and died upon the broken sword!

Ah! but one does not die upon the broken sword; one has to live on.
Would that I could dissuade you from this inky pestilence! This
poetizing spirit, which gives all life so much significance _to the
imagination_, strikes it with sterility in every thing which should
beget or prosper a personal career. It opens the heart--true, but keeps
it open; it closes in on nothing--shuts in nothing for itself. It is an
open heart, and the sunshine enters there, and the bird alights there;
but nothing retains them, and the light and the song depart as freely as
they came. You lose the spring of action, and forfeit the easy
intercourse with the world; for, believe me, however you struggle
against it, so long as you live a poet, will you feel yourself a
stranger or a child amongst men. And all for what? I have that
confidence in your talent, that I am sure you will make no ridiculous
failures. What you write for fame, will be far superior to what others
write for popularity. But these will attain their end, and you, with far
more merit, will be only known as having failed. And know you not that
men revenge on mediocrity the praise extorted from them by indisputable
celebrity? It is a crime to be above the vulgar, and yet not overawe the
vulgar. There are a few great names they cannot refuse to extol; men of
genuine merit, of a larger merit than they can measure, who yet cannot
confessedly approach to these select few, they treat with derision and
contempt.

But suppose the most complete success that you can rationally
expect--what have you done? You have added one work of art the more to a
literature already so rich, that the life of a man can hardly exhaust
it; so rich, that it is compelled to drop by the way, as booty it cannot
preserve, what in another literature, or at an earlier period of its own
career, would have been considered invaluable treasure.

But the question of success or failure is not, af