Cambridge lyceum-lecturers in my boyish days, I find with dismay that
the only name now popularly remembered is that of Emerson: death,
oblivion, or a professorship has closed over all the rest, while the
whole standard of American literature has been vastly raised meanwhile,
and no doubt partly through their labors. To this day, some of our most
gifted writers are being dwarfed by the unkind friendliness of too early
praise. It was 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