Talent is long patience. Everything which one desires to express must be considered with sufficient attention and during a sufficiently long time to discover in it some aspect which no one has yet seen or described. In everything there is still some spot unexplored, because we are accustomed to look at things only with the recollection of what others before us have thought of the subject we are contemplating. The smallest object contains something unknown. Let us find it. In order to describe a fire that flames and a tree on the plain, we must keep looking at that flame and that tree until to our eyes they no longer resemble any other tree, or any other fire. This is the way to become original. Having besides laid down this truth that there are not in the whole world two grains of sand, two specks, two hands, or two noses alike, Flaubert compelled me to describe in a few phrases a being or an object in such a manner as to clearly particularize it, and distinguish it from all the other beings or all the other objects of the same race, or the same species. "When you pass," he would say, "a grocer seated at his shop door, a janitor smoking his pipe, a stand of hackney coaches, show me that grocer and that janitor, their attitude, their whole physical appearance, including also by a skilful description their whole moral nature so that I cannot confound them with any other grocer or any other janitor: make me see, in one word, that a certain cab-horse does not resemble the fifty others that follow or precede it." One underlying reason why American writers so seldom pursue such studies and methods as these is the prevailing disesteem for clearly-focussed attention we have described. Another reason is that the American writer of fiction who loves the pursuit of precise expression will indubitably have to face a number of difficulties which may perhaps not be readily apparent to the writers of other countries. Naturally enough, in his more newly-settled, or rather his settling, nation, made up of many nationalities, the American writer who desires to "particularize" a subject from his country's contemporary history, and "to distinguish this from all the other beings and all the other objects of the same race," will have many more heretofore unexpressed conditions and basic circumstances to evoke in his reader's mind than the German or French or English writer must summon.