Then I am coming back to read the French novelists. There are many of them I do not know. (I do not expect to like them--I do not like Frenchmen.) * * * * * October 22d. I was glancing to-day over a volume of Shelley's, and the memory of old glories thrilled in me. Ah, let me not forget what Shelley was to me in my young struggling days! Let me not forget while I am wrestling with a dull world--let me not forget what a poet is to young men hungering for beauty! Let me not forget! Yes, it is to such that my appeal is, it is by such that I will be judged! It is for such that I toil! For hearts upon whom the cold world has not laid its hand! For the poets and the seekers of all ages! Oh come to me, poets and seekers of all ages--dwell in my memory and strengthen my soul! That I go not down altogether--that I be not overcome by the dull things about me! * * * * * These thoughts are not becoming to a reader of history. But I am not a good reader of history--the old beasts are still growling within me. Something starts a longing in me--I cry out that I am getting dull, that I am going down, that I am putting off--I, who never put off before! And so the old storms rise and the great waves come rolling again! * * * * * October 25th. I read that over just now. Yes, it is this that I dread. I dread the habit of not striving! When that becomes my habit it is my death! And here I sit, day by day--doing just the thing I dread! “Let me go _now_!” something shouts in me. “_Now_--or I shall never go at all!” Oh, if I could find some word to tell men the terror of that thought! --It is my life--that is what it is! To obey this thing within me, to save this thing within me, to _find_ this thing within me--that is my life! * * * * * It is a demon thing--it is a thing that has lifted me up by the hair of my head and shaken me--that has glared at me with the wild eyes of a beast--that has beaten me like a storm of wind and struck me down upon the ground! It shakes me now--it shakes me all the time--it makes me scream with pain--incoherently, frantically. “Oh save me!--Spare me!--Let me go!” * * * * * I rave, you say--yes, I know. That is because I can not say what I feel. But what matters it? * * * * * Sometimes I say to myself, “I put all that in The Captive, and men have not heard it! And now, what can I do that they _will_ hear--shall I have to go out in the streets and scream? Or what other desperate thing is there?” * * * * * --Mark this, oh you world that I can not make hear me! Some desperate thing I shall do--I will not sit here and be respectable always! --I wonder what locusts taste like, and just where one could find wild honey. * * * * * October 29th.