felt to be abnormal, and were something short of that sanity which I
aimed to secure. Clearness on this point is not without its
gratifications, as I have said. While my desire to explain myself in
private ears has been quelled, the habit of getting interested in the
experience of others has been continually gathering strength, and I am
really at the point of finding that this world would be worth living in
without any lot of one's own. Is it not possible for me to enjoy the
scenery of the earth without saying to myself, I have a cabbage-garden
in it? But this sounds like the lunacy of fancying oneself everybody
else and being unable to play one's own part decently--another form of
the disloyal attempt to be independent of the common lot, and to live
without a sharing of pain.

Perhaps I have made self-betrayals enough already to show that I have
not arrived at that non-human independence. My conversational
reticences about myself turn into garrulousness on paper--as the
sea-lion plunges and swims the more energetically because his limbs are
of a sort to make him shambling on land. The act of writing, in spite of
past experience, brings with it the vague, delightful illusion of an
audience nearer to my idiom than the Cherokees, and more numerous than
the visionary One for whom many authors have declared themselves willing
to go through the pleasing punishment of publication. My illusion is of
a more liberal kind, and I imagine a far-off, hazy, multitudinous
assemblage, as in a picture of Paradise, making an approving chorus to
the sentences and paragraphs of which I myself particularly enjoy the
writing. The haze is a necessary condition. If any physiognomy becomes
distinct in the foreground, it is fatal. The countenance is sure to be
one bent on discountenancing my innocent intentions: it is pale-eyed,
incapable of being amused when I am amused or indignant at what makes me
indignant; it stares at my presumption, pities my ignorance, or is