that this was from having a mind so crowded with experiences and
impressions that it could receive no more; and I really suppose that if
the happiest phrase had offered itself to me at some moments, I should
scarcely have looked about me for a landscape or a figure to fit it to. I
was very glad to get back to my dear little city in the West (I found it
seething in an August sun that was hot enough to have calcined the
limestone State House), and to all the friends I was so fond of.




IV.

I did what I could to prove myself unworthy of them by refusing their
invitations, and giving myself wholly to literature, during the early
part of the winter that followed; and I did not realize my error till the
invitations ceased to come, and I found myself in an unbroken
intellectual solitude. The worst of it was that an ungrateful Muse did
little in return for the sacrifices I made her, and the things I now
wrote were not liked by the editors I sent them to. The editorial taste
is not always the test of merit, but it is the only one we have, and I am
not saying the editors were wrong in my case. There were then such a
very few places where you could market your work: the Atlantic in Boston
and Harper's in New York were the magazines that paid, though the
Independent newspaper bought literary material; the Saturday Press
printed it without buying, and so did the old Knickerbocker Magazine,
though there was pecuniary good-will in both these cases. I toiled much
that winter over a story I had long been writing, and at last sent it to
the Atlantic, which had published five poems for me the year before.
After some weeks, or it may have been months, I got it back with a note