"The origin of a thought is greater than the thought. It is often an entire drama; and you see it performed as you read. The crowding multitudes of memories that your literary productions bring up! This was suggested at a social gathering, where you felt distressingly lonely, and it was such a soothing consolation. It was while witnessing a play that that idea came into your mind. The play was a popular success, so you were thinking your own thoughts. One night at a symphony concert you wrote on the edge of a programme: 'Music makes mute poets of us all.' You read it years after, and oh, the cherished recollections that it brings up! But no one else can ever know how great that line is. Here is an idea that illumined your mind while in conversation with ----. There were so many delightful conversations, stirring discussions, endearing episodes; there were scenes that you witnessed, events transpired of which you were part; there were little dramas of which you were both the villain and the hero. They have all passed away, and yet you have saved them from oblivion because you have written, and they cannot die. All things are immortal so long as you live. You read, and the old talks and the old walks, the things that you have seen and done, the joys you have felt and the sorrows you have endured come back and you enjoy them over again. You find this in your writings and so much more. The net results of your own ruminations are so large that there is no wonder all other writers suffer from the comparison. Your writings are the plants, the weeds and the flowers that have grown out of your life, and their aroma and fragrance of earliest bloom follow you to the end of your days. There is that in your inner consciousness which you cannot find anywhere else. "The whole universe is within yourself; in others there is only a queer notion of it. Your crudest expression has more feeling and thought behind it than the most beautiful expression of others. We all cherish and relish our own screeds. Are we not all convinced of their merits and superior qualities? Are we not all anxious to secure editors and publishers? And who rejects them? These editors and the publishers, the people who had nothing to do with the production of these undoubted works of genius. I have piles of scraps of old bits of paper and note-books up in my place, extending over a number of years. They contain stray fragments of thought that I have jotted down at all places and seasons and under all sorts of circumstances. As I come across them now and then, I not only re-experience what has long vanished, but I am again exalted unto all heights of human aspiration and inspiration. The foolishness and the follies, the faith and the fervor, and the blind hopes of my youth are mine again.