This is a wholesale-paper house, and the three partners who run it call themselves, with unconscious irony, “wholesale-paper MEN”! They live their lives in wholesale-paper,--they talk it--they dream it--they plan it--they have no hope in the world except to find people to buy wholesale-paper! And the manager--keen and hungry--he is planning to be a wholesale-paper man himself. And here are twenty-five men and youths apparently having but one virtue in the world, the possibility of consecrating their souls to wholesale-paper! What they make is useful, it may even be sublime--in which way the business is unique. But none of these men ever thinks of that--they would be just as absorbed in the business if it were wholesale bonnets. None of them has the least care in the world about books. And these men who come here to buy the paper--are _they_ any better? Or is their interest in the paper the profits it may bring to them? * * * * * --Dear God!--That brought me back to The Captive. * * * * * --I have been sick to-day, and sickness clips your wings. It is an error of mine--I pay for my food with my soul, and so I try to eat little, and thereby make myself ill. * * * * * August 3d. I got my first twelve dollars to-day! * * * * * August 5th. To-day I made a resolution, that I must stop this chafing, this panting, this beating my wings to pieces. A man's inspiration must be under his control, to stop it, as well as to start it. I can not write or dream poetry while I am in this slavery, and somehow I have to realize it. When I go home I will get to some work, and not wander around hungering. After my glimpse of the forest it is frightful to be penned in this steaming city. To have to work in an office all day--sometimes it makes me reel. And then at night too, when I try to read, the room gets suffocating. Then I go out among the tenement-house crowds, carrying my little note-book. I stop at a lamp-post and look at a couple of words and then walk on and learn them! So I go for hours. * * * * * --Hurry up, publishers!--I wrote to them to-night. * * * * * August 7th. “In answer to your letter of the 5th instant, we beg to inform you that your manuscript is now in the hands of our readers, and that you may expect a report upon it in a week.” * * * * * I am reading Euripides. * * * * * August 8th. Oh how will I find words for my delight when I have got a little money and can escape from dirt and horror. To-night two vile men have been quarreling in the room underneath, and I have been drinking in all their brutal ugliness. Bah!-- * * * * *