assist you
to a decision. Artists in arabesque get an idea by watching the shifting
forms of the kaleidoscope; in the same manner you hope--if I will but
turn my mind about a little--that some lucky adjustment of its fragments
of observation may help you to a serviceable thought or two. At all
events, you shall not have to complain of too much method in what
follows.

If I could only, my dear Eugenius, persuade you to leave them both
alone!--drama and novel both! But this is hopeless. The love one bears
to a woman may be conquered--not indeed by good counsel, but by speedy
flight; but the passion that draws us to poetry and romance can only die
out, it cannot be expelled; for in this passion, go where we will, we
carry our Helen with us. She steals upon us at each unguarded moment,
and renews in secret her kisses upon our lip. Well, if I cannot persuade
you to leave both alone, my next advice is that you attack both; for if
you endeavour to express in either of these forms of composition all
that is probably fermenting in your mind, the chance is that you spoil
your work.

And by all means lay your hands first upon the drama. True, it is the
higher aim of the two, and I will not pretend to augur any very
brilliant success. But still it is the more appropriate to the first
ebullitions of genius, and the spasmodic efforts of youth. The heart is
at this time full of poetry, which, be its value what it may, must be
got rid of before the stream of prose will run clear. Besides, the very
effort of verse seems necessary to this age, which disdains a facile
task, and seeks to expend its utmost vigour on its chosen labour.
Moreover, to write a good novel one should have passed through the
spring-time and enthusiasm of youth--one should be able to survey life
with some degree of tranquillity; neither wrapped in its illusions, nor
full of indignation at its discovered hollowness. At two-and-twenty,
even if the heart is not burning with fever heat of some kind--some
enthusiastic passion or misanthropical disgust--the head at least is
preoccupied with some engrossing idea, which so besets the man, that he
can see nothing clearly in the world around him. At this age he has a
philosophy, a metaphysical system, which he really believes in, (a
species of delusion the first to quit us,) and he persists in seeing his
dogma reflected to him from all sides. This is supportable, or may be
disguised in poetry; it becomes intolerable in pros