I do not know to what I can attribute my timidity.  Possibly it arises from the fact that until recently my writing met with uniform rejection and failure.  For years I wrote secretly in order that few persons might know how miserably I failed.  I answered upon a question that I had given up the practice, that I now had no time for it, that I scribbled now and then but always burned it.  All that while I gave my rare leisure and my stolen afternoons—­the hours that other men give to golf and sleep and sitting together—­these hours I gave to writing.  On a holiday I was at it early.  On Saturday when other folks were abroad, I sat at my desk.  It was my grief that I was so poor a borrower of the night that I blinked stupidly on my papers if I sat beyond the usual hour.  Writing was my obsession.  I need no pity for my failures, for although I tossed my cap upon a rare acceptance, my deeper joy was in the writing.  That joy repeated failures could not blunt.

There are paragraphs that now lie yellow in my desk with their former meaning faded, that still recall as I think of them the first exaltation when I wrote them—­feverishly in a hot emotion.  In those days I thought that I had caught the sunlight on my pen, and the wind and the moon and the spinning earth.  I thought that the valleys and the mountains arose from the mist obedient to me.  If I splashed my pen, in my warm regard it was the roar and fury of the sea.  It was really no more than my youth crying out.  And, alas, my thoughts and my feelings escaped me when I tried to put them down on paper, although I did not know it then.  Perhaps they were too vagrant to be held.  And yet these paragraphs that might be mournful records of failure, fill me with no more than a tender recollection for the boy who wrote them.  The worn phrases now beg their way with broken steps.  Like shrill and piping minstrels they whine and crack a melody that I still remember in its freshness.

But perhaps, reader, we are brothers in these regards.  Perhaps you, too, have faded papers.  Or possibly, even on a recent date, you sighed your soul into an essay or a sonnet, and you now have manuscript which you would like to sell.  Do not mistake me!  I am not an editor, nor am I an agent for these wares.  Rather I speak as a friend who, having many such hidden sorrows, offers you a word of comfort.  To a desponding Hamlet I exclaim, “’Tis common, my Lord.”  I have so many friends that have had an unproductive fling toward letters, that I think the malady is general.  So many books are published and flourish a little while in their bright wrappers, but yours and theirs and mine waste away in a single precious copy.