Day by day I strive and struggle and tear my-self to pieces, and sink back worn out; and don't you suppose that has any effect upon me? I can feel it. I see it plain as day, and shudder at it--I am being cowed! I am being tamed, subdued, overpowered; the thing is like a great cold hand that is laid upon me, pressing me down, smothering me! I know it--and I cry out and struggle as if in a nightmare; but it only presses the harder. Why, I was like a lion--restless--savage--all-devouring! Never-ceasing, eager, untamable--hungry for life, for experience, for power! I rushed through in days what others took months at--I watched every instant--I crowded hours into it. * * * * * --And now look at me! I crouch and whine--there is an endless moan in my soul. Can you break a man's spirit so that he never rises again? So that all his attempts to be what he was mock at him? So that he never _tries_ any more? Look at those poor wretches you pass on the street--those peasants from Europe, from Russia! See the restless, shifting eyes, the cringing gait--_that_ is what it is to be tamed! * * * * * Hateful tyrant of the commonplace--so you will lay your cold hand over me and crush out all the fire from my heart. All this that was to build new empires--new hopes, new virtues, new power; all that I was, and all that I sought to be! Ah, but you will not crush me--understand it well, you may beat me and kick me, you may starve me to death, but you will never overcome me, you will never tame me into one of the pack-horses of society! I will fight while I have a breath in me, while my heart has left one beat. The time may come when I shall have to drag myself away like a sick beast to die in the mountains; but if it does, I shall go defying you! * * * * * Bah! --How I wish I could find a rich man who could spare it, and from whom I could steal a thousand dollars. I would turn it into a thousand songs that diamonds could not buy--that would build new empires--and then I would pay the poor rich man back. * * * * * --I read a poem of Matthew Arnold's last night: From the world's temptations, From tribulations; From that fierce anguish Wherein we languish; From that torpor deep Wherein we lie asleep, Heavy as death, cold as the grave, Save, oh save! * * * * * September 10th. A man was talking to me to-day about what I am doing. “I should think you would try to get some work more congenial,” he said, “some literary work.” Yes!--I sell wholesale-paper, and that is bad enough; but at least I do not sell my character. I to enter into the literary business world! I to forsake my ideals and my standards--to learn to please the public and the men who make money out of the public! Ah, no--let me go on selling paper, and “keep my love as a thing apart--no heathen shall look therein!”