"They are very nicely done," said the parson; "but I'm afraid you won't
find anybody to print them, my boy."

So he pottered on; reading everything, imitating what struck his fancy,
attempting the effect of the classic meters in English verse, trying his
hand at a masque, a Restoration comedy, forming impossible plans for
books which rarely got beyond half a dozen lines on a sheet of paper;
beset with splendid fancies which refused to abide before the pen. But
the vain joy of conception was not altogether vain, for it gave him some
armor about his heart.

The months went by, monotonous, and sometimes blotted with despair. He
wrote and planned and filled the waste-paper basket with hopeless
efforts. Now and then he sent verses or prose articles to magazines, in
pathetic ignorance of the trade. He felt the immense difficulty of the
career of literature without clearly understanding it; the battle was
happily in a mist, so that the host of the enemy, terribly arrayed, was
to some extent hidden. Yet there was enough of difficulty to appall; from
following the intricate course of little nameless brooks, from hushed
twilight woods, from the vision of the mountains, and the breath of the
great wind, passing from deep to deep, he would come home filled with
thoughts and emotions, mystic fancies which he yearned to translate into
the written word. And the result of the effort seemed always to be
bathos! Wooden sentences, a portentous stilted style, obscurity, and
awkwardness clogged the pen; it seemed impossible to win the great secret
of language; the stars glittered only in the darkness, and vanished away
in clearer light. The periods of despair were often long and heavy, the
victories very few and trifling; night after night he sat writing after
his father had knocked out his last pipe, filling a page with difficulty
in an hour, and usually forced to thrust the stuff away in despair, and