enjoyed in anticipation.

The man who can sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as
a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But
gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting
it to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every
morning with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's heart, licking
it clean, dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be
instantly destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of
this headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in
sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in
painting to every memory, in music to every heart!--This is the task
of execution. The hand must be ready at every instant to come forward
and obey the brain. But the brain has no more a creative power at
command than love has a perennial spring.

The habit of creativeness, the indefatigable love of motherhood which
makes a mother--that miracle of nature which Raphael so perfectly
understood--the maternity of the brain, in short, which is so
difficult to develop, is lost with prodigious ease. Inspiration is the
opportunity of genius. She does not indeed dance on the razor's edge,
she is in the air and flies away with the suspicious swiftness of a
crow; she wears no scarf by which the poet can clutch her; her hair is
a flame; she vanishes like the lovely rose and white flamingo, the
sportsman's despair. And work, again, is a weariful struggle, alike
dreaded and delighted in by these lofty and powerful natures who are
often broken by it. A great poet of our day has said in speaking of
this overwhelming labor, "I sit down to it in despair, but I leave it
with regret." Be it known to all who are ignorant! If the artist does
not throw himself into his work as Curtius sprang into the gulf, as a