brings to light what in our souls was latent, and does but correct,
beautify, and publish the correspondence which an ordinary reader carries
on privately every day between himself and his mind or his heart. If
this superiority in the genius be but style and form, I abandon my dream
of being something else than a singer of words by another to the music of
another. But then, what then? My knowledge of books and art is
wonderfully small. What little I do know I gather from very few books
and from what I hear said by the few worth listening to whom I happen to
meet; and out of these, in solitude and revery, not by conscious effort,
I arrive at some results which appear to my inexperience original.
Perhaps, indeed, they have the same kind of originality as the musical
compositions of amateurs who effect a cantata or a quartette made up of
borrowed details from great masters, and constituting a whole so original
that no real master would deign to own it. Oh, if I could get you to
understand how unsettled, how struggling my whole nature at this moment
is! I wonder what is the sensation of the chrysalis which has been a
silkworm, when it first feels the new wings stirring within its shell,--
wings, alas! they are but those of the humblest and shortest-lived sort
of moth, scarcely born into daylight before it dies. Could it reason, it
might regret its earlier life, and say, "Better be the silkworm than the
moth."


FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

Have you known well any English people in the course of your life? I say
well, for you must have had acquaintance with many. But it seems to me
so difficult to know an Englishman well. Even I, who so loved and
revered Mr. Selby,--I, whose childhood was admitted into his
companionship by that love which places ignorance and knowledge, infancy