and had failed
to satisfy him in the end.

Two fiction schemes that had always possessed him he had been unable
to bring to any conclusion. Both of these have been mentioned in former
chapters; one being the notion of a long period of dream-existence
during a brief moment of sleep, and the other being the story of a
mysterious visitant from another realm. He had experimented with each of
these ideas in no less than three forms, and there was fine writing and
dramatic narrative in all; but his literary architecture had somehow
fallen short of his conception. "The Mysterious Stranger" in one of its
forms I thought might be satisfactorily concluded, and he admitted that
he could probably end it without much labor. He discussed something of
his plans, and later I found the notes for its conclusion. But I suppose
he was beyond the place where he could take up those old threads, though
he contemplated, fondly enough, the possibility, and recalled how he had
read at least one form of the dream tale to Howells, who had urged him
to complete it.

CCLXXXIII. ASTRONOMY AND DREAMS

August 5, 1909. This morning I noticed on a chair a copy of Flaubert's
Salammbo which I recently lent him. I asked if he liked it.

"No," he said, "I didn't like any of it."

"But you read it?"

"Yes, I read every line of it."

"You admitted its literary art?"

"Well, it's like this: If I should go to the Chicago stockyards and they
should kill a beef and cut it up and the blood should splash all over
everything, and then they should take me to another pen and kill another
beef and the blood should splash over everything again, and so on to pen
after pen, I should care for it about as much as I do for that book."

"But those were bloody days, and you care very much for that period in
history."

"Yes, that is so. But when I read Tacitus and know that I am reading
history I can accept it as such and supply the imaginary details and
enjoy it, but this thing is such a continuous procession of blood and
slaughter and stench it worries me. It has great art--I can see that.
That scene of the crucified lions and the death canon and the tent scene
are marvelous, but I wouldn't read that book again without a salary."

August 16. He is reading Suetonius, which he already knows by heart--so
full of the cruelties and licentiousness of imperial Rome.

This afternoon he began talking about Claudius.

"They called Claudius a lunatic," he said, "bu