The whole possibility of a scene--that is what I pant for, always; that it should be all there, and yet not a line to spare; compact, solid, each phrase coming like a blow; and above all else, that it should be inevitable! When you stand upon the height of your being, and behold the thing with all your faculties--the thing and the phrase are one, and one to all eternity. * * * * * 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 they are wonderful!” --I do not believe in my soul to-day, because I have none. * * * * * April 25th. Would you like to know where I am, and how I am doing all these things? I am in a lodging-house. I have one of three hall rooms in a kind of top half-story. There is room for me to take four steps; so it is that I “walk up and down” when I am excited. I have tried--I have not kept count of how many places--and this is the quietest. The landlady's husband has a carpenter shop down-stairs, but he is always drunk and doesn't work; it has also been providentially arranged that the daughter, who sings, is sick for some time. Next door to me there is a man who plays the 'cello in a dance hall until I know not what hour of the night. He keeps his 'cello at the dance hall. Next to him is a pale woman who sits and sews all day and waits for her drunken husband to come home. In front there is some kind of foolish girl who leaves her door open in the hope that I'll look in at her, and a couple of inoffensive people not worth describing.