grows older the nervous system may get shaken and even broken down:
remembering how the train of thought which your mind has produced
melts away from you unless you preserve a record of it (for I am
persuaded that to many men that which they themselves have written
looks before very long as strange and new as that produced by
another mind): remembering these things, I say to myself, and to
you if you choose to listen: Write sermons diligently: write them
week by week, and always do your very best: never make up your mind
that this one shall be a third-rate affair, just to get the Sunday
over; and thus accumulate material for use in days when thoughts
will not come so readily, and when the hand must write tremblingly
and slow. Don't be misled by any clap-trap about the finer thing
being to have the mental machine always equal to its task. You
cannot have that. The mind is a wayward, capricious thing. The
engine which did its sixty miles an hour to-day, may be depended on
(barring accident) to do as much to-morrow. But it is by no means
certain that because you wrote your ten or twenty pages to-day,
you will be able to do the like on another day. What educated man
does not know, that when he sits down to his desk after breakfast,
it is quite uncertain whether he will accomplish an ordinary task,
or a double task, or a quadruple one? Dogged determination may
make sure, on almost every day, of a decent amount of produced
material: but the quality varies vastly, and the quantity which the
same degree and continuance of strain will produce is not a priori
to be calculated. And a spinning-jenny will day by day produce
thread of uniform quality: but a very clever man, by very great
labour, will on some days write miserable rubbish. And no one will
feel that more bitterly than himself.

I pass from thinking of these things to a matter somewhat connected