taken up by the Cadmean
Art. The whole fair domain of learning belongs to it; for nowhere now,
in garden, grove, or Stoical Porch, with only the living voices of man
and Nature, do students acquaint themselves with the joyous solemnities,
the mysterious certainties of thought. The mind lives in a universe of
type. There is no other art in which so desperate adventures are made.
Indeed, the normal mental state of the abundant writer is a marvellous
phenomenon. The literary faculty is born of the marriage of chronic
desperation with chronic trust. This may account in part for that
peculiar condition of mind which is both engendered and required by
abundant writing. A bold abandon, a desperate guidance, a thoughtless
ratiocination, a mechanical swaying of rhetoric, are the grounds of
dissertation. A pause for a few days, a visit to the country, anything
that would seem designed to restore the mind to its normal state,
destroys the faculty. The weary penman, who wishes his chaotic head
could be relieved by being transformed even as by Puck, knows that very
whirling chaos is the condition of his multitudinous periods. It seems
as if some special sluices of the soul must be opened to force the pen.
One man, on returning to his desk from a four weeks' vacation, took up
an unfinished article which he had left, and marvelled that such writing
should ever have proceeded from him. He could hardly understand it,
still less could he conceive of the mental process by which he had once
created it. That process was a sort of madness, and the discipline of
newspapers is inflicting it alike upon writers and readers.
Demoralization is the result of a life-long devotion to the maddening
rumors of the day. It takes many a day to recall that fierce caprice, as
of an Oriental despot, with which he watches the tiger-fights of ideas,
and strikes off periods, as the tyrant strikes off heads.

And while no other art commands so universal homage, no other is so
purely artificial, so absolutely unsymbolical. The untutored mind sees
nothing in a printed column. A library has no natural impressiveness. It
is not in the shape of anything in this world of infinite beauty. The
barbarians of Omri destroyed one without a qualm. They have occupied
apartments in seraglios, but the beauties have never feared them as
rivals. Of all human employments, writing is the farthest removed from
any touch of Nature. It is at most a symbolism twice dead and buried.
The