as Keats, the most precocious of all great poets, the stock
victim of critical assassination,--though the charge does him utter
injustice,--who declared that "nothing is finer for purposes of
production than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers."

Yet do not be made conceited by obscurity, any more than by notoriety.
Many fine geniuses have been long neglected; but what would become
of us, if all the neglected were to turn out geniuses? It is unsafe
reasoning from either extreme. You are not necessarily writing like
Holmes because your reputation for talent began in college, nor like
Hawthorne because you have been before the public ten years without an
admirer. Above all, do not seek to encourage yourself by dwelling on
the defects of your rivals: strength comes only from what is above you.
Northcote, the painter, said, that, in observing an inferior picture,
he always felt his spirits droop, with the suspicion that perhaps he
deceived himself and his own paintings were no better; but the works of
the mighty masters always gave him renewed strength, in the hope that
perhaps his own had in their smaller way something of the same divine
quality.

Do not complacently imagine, because your first literary attempt proved
good and successful, that your second will doubtless improve upon it.
The very contrary sometimes happens. A man dreams for years over
one projected composition, all his reading converges to it, all his
experience stands related to it, it is the net result of his existence
up to a certain time, it is the cistern into which he pours his
accumulated life. Emboldened by success, he mistakes the cistern for a
fountain, and instantly taps his brain again. The second production,
as compared with the first, costs but half the pains and attains but
a quarter part of the merit; a little more of fluency and facility
perhaps,--but the vigor, the wealth, the originality, the head of water,
in short, are wanting. One would think that almost any intelligent man
might write one good thing in a lifetime, by reserving himself long
enough: it is the effort after quantity which proves destructive. The
greatest man has passed his zenith, when he once begins to cheapen
his style of work and sink into a book-maker: after that, though the
newspapers may never hint at it, nor his admirers own it, the decline of
his career is begun.

Yet the author is not alone to blame for this, but also the world which
first tempt