4 AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 



a man who had failed as a lawyer, and then had 

 written a history of Poland, which I have never 

 heard of since that time ; but to me he was the 

 embodiment of the august spirit of authorship, and 

 I looked upon him with more reverence and enthu- 

 siasm than I had ever looked before upon any man. 

 I do not think I could have approached and spoken 

 to him on any consideration. I cannot at this date 

 divine why I should have stood in such worshipful 

 fear and awe of this obscure individual, but I sup- 

 pose it was the instinctive tribute of a timid and 

 imaginative youth to a power which he was just 

 beginning vaguely to see, — the power of letters. 



It was at about this time that I first saw my own 

 thoughts in print, — a communication of some kind 

 to a little country paper published in an adjoining 

 town. In my twenty-second or twenty-third year, 

 I began to send rude and crude essays to the maga- 

 zines and to certain New York weekly papers, but 

 they came back again pretty promptly. I wrote on 

 such subjects as "Revolutions," "A Man and his 

 Times," " Genius," " Individuality." At this period 

 of my life I was much indebted to Whipple, whose 

 style, as it appears in his earlier essays and in the 

 thin volume of lectures published by Ticknor, Reed 

 & Fields about 1853, is, in my judgment, much 

 better than in his later writings. It was never a 

 good style, not at all magnetic or penetrating, but 

 it was clear and direct, and, to my mind at that 



