everything else; and that is not the problem now. You must learn to
strive, learn to master yourself; you must prove your power so. Do
not care how rude you have to be to those people; look upon the
things about you as a kind of dream-world, and know that your own
soul's life is the one real thing for you. And don't write any more
about how circumstances hold you back. When you have got to work you
will know that you are given your soul for no purpose but to fight
circumstances; that they are the things to make you fight. When they
are removed, as I know to my cost, there is still the same necessity
of fighting; only it is like a horse who has to win a race without
the spurs.

You must talk to yourself about this, night and day, until this
desire is so awake in you that you can't go idle many moments
without its rushing into your mind, and giving you a kind of
electric shock. And when that happens you fling aside every thing
else, every idea but the work that you ought to be doing, and put
all your faculties upon that; and every time that you catch them
wandering, you do the same thing again, and again. Some times when I
become very keenly aware of myself, and of what a shallow creature I
really am, it seems to me that it is only by wearing myself out in
that grim and savage way that I can make myself even tolerable.

I _must_ stop. Do you know that for five precious hours by my watch
I have sat up here thinking about you and writing to you? Dear
me--and I am tired, and frozen, for there is a cold wind. I shall
have, I see, to prove some of _my_ powers, by not writing letters to
you when I should be at the book.

I see that it takes four or five days for letters to come and go