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April 24th.

I was looking at a literary journal to-day. Oh, my soul, it frightens me!
All these libraries of books--who reads them, what are they for? And each
one of them a hope! And I am to leap over them all--I--I? I dare not think
about it.

I have been helpless to-day. I can not find what I want--I struggled for
hours, I wore myself out with struggling. And I have torn up what I wrote.

Blank verse is such a--such a thing not to be spoken of! Is there anything
worse, except it be a sonnet? How many miles of it are ground out every
day--sometimes that kind comes to me to mock me--I could have written a
whole poem full of it this afternoon. If there are two lines of that sort
in The Captive, I'll burn it all.

An awful doubt came to me besides. Somebody had sown it long ago, and it
sprouted to-day. "Yes, but will it be _interesting_?"

Heaven help me, how am I to know if it will be interesting? The question
made me shudder; I have never thought anything about making it
interesting--I've been trying to make it true. Can it possibly be that the
ecstasy of one soul, the reality of one soul, the quivering, exulting life
of it--will not interest any other soul?

"How can you know that what you are doing is real, anyhow?" The devil would
plague me to death to-day. "But how many millions write poems and think