all records of human experience are as so many bound herbaria to
the innumerable glowing, glistening, rustling, breathing,
fragrance-laden, poison-sucking, life-giving, death-distilling
leaves and flowers of the forest and the prairies. All we can do
with books of human experience is to make them alive again with
something borrowed from our own lives. We can make a book alive
for us just in proportion to its resemblance in essence or in form
to our own experience. Now an author's first novel is naturally
drawn, to a great extent, from his personal experiences; that is,
is a literal copy of nature under various slight disguises. But
the moment the author gets out of his personality, he must have the
creative power, as well as the narrative art and the sentiment, in
order to tell a living story; and this is rare.

Besides, there is great danger that a man's first life-story shall
clean him out, so to speak, of his best thoughts. Most lives,
though their stream is loaded with sand and turbid with alluvial
waste, drop a few golden grains of wisdom as they flow along.
Oftentimes a single CRADLING gets them all, and after that the poor
man's labor is only rewarded by mud and worn pebbles. All which
proves that I, as an individual of the human family, could write
one novel or story at any rate, if I would.

- Why don't I, then?--Well, there are several reasons against it.
In the first place, I should tell all my secrets, and I maintain
that verse is the proper medium for such revelations. Rhythm and
rhyme and the harmonies of musical language, the play of fancy, the
fire of imagination, the flashes of passion, so hide the nakedness
of a heart laid open, that hardly any confession, transfigured in
the luminous halo of poetry, is reproached as self-exposure. A