The theory of evolution came as a natural thing to me.  It seemed that I knew it all, before,—­as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life, exactly to the Darwinian conclusion.

Whitman’s Leaves of Grass became my Bible.

* * * * *

It was at this time that I made the harrowing discovery that I had been working evil on myself ... through an advertisement of a quack in a daily paper.

And now I became an anchorite battling to save myself from the newly discovered monstrosity of the flesh....  For several days I would be the victor, but the thing I hugged to my bosom would finally win.  Then would follow a terror beyond comprehension, a horror of remorse and degradation that human nature seemed too frail to bear.  I grew thinner still.  I fell into a hacking cough.

And, at the same time, I became more perverse in my affectation of innocence and purity—­saying always to my father that I never could care for girls, and that what people married for was beyond my comprehension.  Thus I threw his alarmed inquisitiveness off the track....

I procured books about sexual life.  My most cherished volume was an old family medical book with charred covers, smelling of smoke and water, that I had dug out of the ruins of a neighbouring fire.

In the book was a picture of a nude woman, entitled The Female Form Divine.  I tore this from the body of the book and kept it under my pillow.

I would draw it forth, press it against myself, speak soft words of affection to it, caress and kiss it, fix my mind on it as if it were a living presence.  Often the grey light of dawn would put its ashen hand across my sunken cheeks before dead-heavy, exhausted sleep proved kind to me....

* * * * *

Again:  my imagination grew to be all graveyards, sepulchral urns, skeletons.  How beautiful it would be to die young and a poet, to die like the young English poet, Henry Kirke White, whose works I was so enamoured of.  The wan consumptive glamour of his career led me, as he had done, to stay up all night, night after night, studying....

* * * * *

After the surging and mounting of that in me which I could not resist, several hours of strange, abnormal calm would ensue and for that space I would swing calm and detached from myself, like a luminous, disembodied entity.  And then it was that I would write and write.  The verses would come rushing from my pen.  I must hurry with them before my early death overtook me.

* * * * *

There were two visions I saw continually in my sleep: 

One was of myself walking with a proud step down a vast hall, the usual wreath of fame on my head.  I wore a sort of toga.  And of course a great concourse of people stood apart in silent reverence on either side, gazing at me admiringly.  With the thunder of their hand-clapping I would wake.