uish the books of the mere writers from the
books of real men! For true literature, like happiness, is ever a
by-product; it is the half-conscious expression of a man greatly engaged
in some other undertaking; it is the song of one working. There is
something inevitable, unrestrainable about the great books; they seemed
to come despite the author. "I could not sleep," says the poet Horace,
"for the pressure of unwritten poetry." Dante said of his books that
they "made him lean for many days." I have heard people say of a writer
in explanation of his success:

"Oh, well, he has the literary knack."

It is not so! Nothing is further from the truth. He writes well not
chiefly because he is interested in writing, or because he possesses any
especial knack, but because he is more profoundly, vividly interested in
the activities of life and he tells about them--over his shoulder. For
writing, like farming, is ever a tool, not an end.

How the great one-book men remain with us! I can see Marcus Aurelius
sitting in his camps among the far barbarians writing out the
reflections of a busy life. I see William Penn engaged in great
undertakings, setting down "Some of the Fruits of Solitude," and Abraham
Lincoln striking, in the hasty paragraphs written for his speeches, one
of the highest notes in our American literature.

* * * * *

"David?"

"Yes, Harriet."

"I am going up now; it is very late."

"Yes."

"You will bank the fire and see that the doors are locked?"

"Yes."

After a pause: "And, David, I didn't mean--about the story you read. Did
the Knight finally kill the lions?"

"No," I said with sobriety, "it was not finally necessary."

"But I thought he set out to kill them."

"He did; but he proved his valour without doing it."

Harriet paused, made as if to speak again, but did not do so.

"Valour"--I began in my hortatory tone, seeing a fair opening, but at
the look in her eye I immediately desisted.

"You won't stay up late?" she warned.

"N-o," I said.

Take John Bunyan as a pattern of the man who forgot himself into
immortality. How seriously he wrote sermons and pamphlets, now happily
forgotten! But it was not until he was shut up in jail (some writers I
know might profit by his example) that he "put aside," as he said, "a
more serious and important work" and wrote "Pilgrim's Progress." It is
the strangest thing in the world--the judgment of men as to what is
imp