From Pillar to Post 



insects." It is never safe to quote Emerson. 

 All that follows suffers so much. Too like a 

 jewel that has fallen into the mud; but, pre- 

 sumptuous as it may seem, I had thought his 

 thought and crudely set it down before I had 

 met it in " Self -Reliance." 



How is one's book to be made to smell of 

 pines? No treatise on literature sets forth the 

 secret. I know that years ago I sent an essay 

 on a brook to an editor and he suggested that I 

 must have seen a brook after a protracted 

 drought, for what I said of it was dry as dust. 

 I have no exalted opinion of editorial omnisci- 

 ence, but probably in this case he was right. A 

 sworn-off, bibulous husband took a glass of beer 

 now and then, during his wife's absence, but the 

 secret indulgence was discovered. She smelt it 

 in the ink, when he wrote her a letter. We are 

 too sober when we record what we have seen 

 and heard. The intoxication of the passing 

 moment should be riotous within us when we 

 record not what we have witnessed but what we 

 are now seeing; our eyes not on the paper, but 

 the object. Let the pen or pencil take care of 

 itself, and if held by the fingers of genuine 

 merit, they will do so. The eye and the ear 



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