beyond its capacity. It was coupled with an enormous
facility of execution and the ability to pass with undiminished
freshness from one field of action to another. It sprang from the
intensity with which every idea was conceived, and which belonged
equally to his smallest with his greatest undertakings. "The book," he
writes of the _Chimes_, "has made my face white in a foreign land. My
cheeks, which were beginning to fill out, have sunk again; my eyes have
grown immensely large; my hair is very lank, and the head inside the
hair is hot and giddy. Read the scene at the end of the third part
twice. I wouldn't write it twice for something.... Since I conceived, at
the beginning of the second part, what must happen in the third, I have
undergone as much sorrow and agitation as if the thing were real, and
have wakened up with it at night. I was obliged to lock myself in when I
finished it yesterday, for my face was swollen for the time to twice its
proper size, and was hugely ridiculous." The little book was written at
Genoa; and having finished it, he must make a winter journey to London,
"because," as he writes to Forster, "of that unspeakable restless
something which would render it almost as impossible for me to remain
here, and not see the thing complete, as it would be for a full
balloon, left to itself, not to go up." A further reason was to try the
effect of the story upon a circle of listeners, to be assembled for the
purpose: "Carlyle, indispensable, and I should like his wife of all
things; _her_ judgment would be invaluable. You will ask Mac, and why
not his sister? Stanny and Jerrold I should particularly wish. Edwin
Landseer, Blanchard perhaps Harness; and what say you to Fonblanque and
Fox?" After this it is amusing to read that the book "was not one of his
greatest successes, and it raised him up some objectors;" but the
reading was the germ of those which afterward brought him into such
close relations with his public.

Of another Christmas story he writes, "I dreamed _all last week_ that
the _Battle of Life_ was a series of chambers, impossible to be got to
rights or got out of, through which I wandered drearily all night. On
Saturday night I don't think I slept an hour. I was perpetually roaming
through the story, and endeavoring to dovetail the revolution here into
the plot. The mental distress quite horrible." Here we have, perhaps, a
clear case of the effects of overwork. But in general the details of h