It is twenty-three months since I earned a penny by the craft of literature, and yet I know no fault I have committed.... I am tempted to go to America.... I shall quit literature, it does not invite me. Providence warns me to have done with it. I have failed in the Divine Infernal Universe; or meditating, when at the lowest ebb, to go wandering about the world like Teufelsdroeckh, looking for a rest for the sole of his foot. And yet all the time, with incomparable naivete, he was asserting:-- The longer I live among this people the deeper grows my feeling of natural superiority to them.... The literary world here is a thing which I have no other course left me but to defy.... I can reverence no existing man. With health and peace for one year, I could write a better book than there has been in this country for generations. All through his journal and his correspondence there is a perpetual alternation of despair and confidence, always closing with the refrain, "Working, trying is the only remover of doubt," and wise counsels often echoed from Goethe, "Accomplish as well as you can the task on hand, and the next step will become clear;" on the other hand--A man must not only be able to work but to give over working.... If a man wait till he has entirely brushed off his imperfections, he will spin for ever on his axis, advancing no whither.... The _French Revolution_ stands pretty fair in my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to splash down what I know in large masses of colours, that it may look like a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance.