The man engaged in the writing of books is tempted to make such writing the be-all and end-all of his existence—­to grow his literature out of his history, experience, or observation, as the gardener grows out of soils brought from a distance the plants which he intends to exhibit.  The cup of life foams fiercely over into first books; materials for the second, third, and fourth must be carefully sought for.  The man of letters, as time passes on, and the professional impulse works deeper, ceases to regard the world with a single eye.  The man slowly merges into the artist.  He values new emotions and experiences, because he can turn these into artistic shapes.  He plucks “copy” from rising and setting suns.  He sees marketable pathos in his friend’s death-bed.  He carries the peal of his daughter’s marriage-bells into his sentences or his rhymes; and in these the music sounds sweeter to him than in the sunshine and the wind.  If originally of a meditative, introspective mood, his profession can hardly fail to confirm and deepen his peculiar temperament.  He begins to feel his own pulse curiously, and for a purpose.  As a spy in the service of literature, he lives in the world and its concerns.  Out of everything he seeks thoughts and images, as out of everything the bee seeks wax and honey.  A curious instance of this mode of looking at things occurs in Goethe’s “Letters from Italy,” with whom, indeed, it was fashion, and who helped himself out of the teeming world to more effect than any man of his time:—­

“From Botzen to Trent the stage is nine leagues, and runs through a valley which constantly increases in fertility.  All that merely struggles into vegetation on the higher mountains has here more strength and vitality.  The sun shines with warmth, and there is once more belief in a Deity.

“A poor woman cried out to me to take her child into my vehicle, as the soil was burning its feet.  I did her this service out of honour to the strong light of Heaven.  The child was strangely decked out, but I could get nothing from it in any way.”

It is clear that out of all this the reader gains; but I cannot help thinking that for the writer it tends to destroy entire and simple living—­all hearty and final enjoyment in life.  Joy and sorrow, death and marriage, the comic circumstance and the tragic, what befalls him, what he observes, what he is brought into contact with, do not affect him as they affect other men; they are secrets to be rifled, stones to be built with, clays to be moulded into artistic shape.  In giving emotional material artistic form, there is indisputably a certain noble pleasure; but it is of a solitary and severe complexion, and takes a man out of the circle and sympathies of his fellows.  I do not say that this kind of life makes a man selfish, but it often makes him seem so; and the results of this seeming, on friendship and the domestic relationships, for instance, are