I say I was early on the lockout for books of essays, and I wanted
the essay to begin, not in a casual way by some remark in the first
person, but by the annunciation of some general truth, as most of
Dr. Johnson's did. I think I bought Dick's works on the strength
of his opening sentence--"Man is a compound being."

As one's mind develops, how many changes in taste he passes
through! About the time of which I am now writing, Pope was my
favorite poet. His wit and common sense appealed to me. Young's
"Night Thoughts" also struck me as very grand. Whipple seemed to
me a much greater writer than Emerson. Shakespeare I did not come
to appreciate till years later, and Chaucer and Spenser I have
never learned to care for.

I am sure the growth of my literary taste has been along the right
lines--from the formal and the complex, to the simple and direct.
Now, the less the page seems written, that is, the more natural and
instinctive it is, other things being equal, the more it pleases
me. I would have the author take no thought of his style, as such;
yet if his sentences are clothed like the lilies of the field, so
much the better. Unconscious beauty that flows inevitably and
spontaneously out of the subject, or out of the writer's mind,
how it takes us!

My own first attempts at writing were, of course, crude enough. It
took me a long time to put aside all affectation and make-believe,
if I have ever quite succeeded in doing it, and get down to what I
really saw and felt. But I think now I can tell dead wood in my
writing when I see it--tell when I fumble in my mind, or when my