Madmen, you know, see visions, hold conversations with, even draw the likeness of, people invisible to you and me.  Is this making of people out of fancy madness? and are novel-writers at all entitled to strait-waistcoats?  I often forget people’s names in life; and in my own stories contritely own that I make dreadful blunders regarding them; but I declare, my dear sir, with respect to the personages introduced into your humble servant’s fables, I know the people utterly—­I know the sound of their voices.  A gentleman came in to see me the other day, who was so like the picture of Philip Firmin in Mr. Walker’s charming drawings in the cornhill Magazine, that he was quite a curiosity to me.  The same eyes, beard, shoulders, just as you have seen them from month to month.  Well, he is not like the Philip Firmin in my mind.  Asleep, asleep in the grave, lies the bold, the generous, the reckless, the tender-hearted creature whom I have made to pass through those adventures which have just been brought to an end.  It is years since I heard the laughter ringing, or saw the bright blue eyes.  When I knew him both were young.  I become young as I think of him.  And this morning he was alive again in this room, ready to laugh, to fight, to weep.  As I write, do you know, it is the gray of evening; the house is quiet; everybody is out; the room is getting a little dark, and I look rather wistfully up from the paper with perhaps ever so little fancy that he may come in.—­No?  No movement.  No gray shade, growing more palpable, out of which at last look the well-known eyes.  No, the printer came and took him away with the last page of the proofs.  And with the printer’s boy did the whole cortege of ghosts flit away, invisible?  Ha! stay! what is this?  Angels and ministers of grace!  The door opens, and a dark form—­enters, bearing a black—­a black suit of clothes.  It is John.  He says it is time to dress for dinner.

*****

Every man who has had his German tutor, and has been coached through the famous “Faust” of Goethe (thou wert my instructor, good old Weissenborn, and these eyes beheld the great master himself in dear little Weimar town!) has read those charming verses which are prefixed to the drama, in which the poet reverts to the time when his work was first composed, and recalls the friends now departed, who once listened to his song.  The dear shadows rise up around him, he says; he lives in the past again.  It is to-day which appears vague and visionary.  We humbler writers cannot create Fausts, or raise up monumental works that shall endure for all ages; but our books are diaries, in which our own feelings must of necessity be set down.  As we look to the page written last month, or ten years ago, we remember the day and its events; the child ill, mayhap, in the adjoining room, and the doubts and fears which racked the brain as it still pursued its work; the dear old friend who read the commencement of the tale,