—­Some of you boarders ask me from time to time why I don’t write a story, or a novel, or something of that kind.  Instead of answering each one of you separately, I will thank you to step up into the wholesale department for a few moments, where I deal in answers by the piece and by the bale.

That every articulately-speaking human being has in him stuff for one novel in three volumes duodecimo has long been with me a cherished belief.  It has been maintained, on the other hand, that many persons cannot write more than one novel,—­that all after that are likely to be failures.—­Life is so much more tremendous a thing in its heights and depths than any transcript of it can be, that all records of human experience are as so many bound herbaria to the innumerable glowing, glistening, rustling, breathing, fragrance-laden, poison-sucking, life-giving, death-distilling leaves and flowers of the forest and the prairies.  All we can do with books of human experience is to make them alive again with something borrowed from our own lives.  We can make a book alive for us just in proportion to its resemblance in essence or in form to our own experience.  Now an author’s first novel is naturally drawn, to a great extent, from his personal experiences; that is, is a literal copy of nature under various slight disguises.  But the moment the author gets out of his personality, he must have the creative power, as well as the narrative art and the sentiment, in order to tell a living story; and this is rare.

Besides, there is great danger that a man’s first life-story shall clean him out, so to speak, of his best thoughts.  Most lives, though their stream is loaded with sand and turbid with alluvial waste, drop a few golden grains of wisdom as they flow along.  Oftentimes a single cradling gets them all, and after that the poor man’s labor is only rewarded by mud and worn pebbles.  All which proves that I, as an individual of the human family, could write one novel or story at any rate, if I would.

—­Why don’t I, then?—­Well, there are several reasons against it.  In the first place, I should tell all my secrets, and I maintain that verse is the proper medium for such revelations.  Rhythm and rhyme and the harmonies of musical language, the play of fancy, the fire of imagination, the flashes of passion, so hide the nakedness of a heart laid open, that hardly any confession, transfigured in the luminous halo of poetry, is reproached as self-exposure.  A beauty shows herself under the chandeliers, protected by the glitter of her diamonds, with such a broad snowdrift of white arms and shoulders laid bare, that, were she unadorned and in plain calico, she would be unendurable—­in the opinion of the ladies.

Again, I am terribly afraid I should show up all my friends.  I should like to know if all story-tellers do not do this?  Now I am afraid all my friends would not bear showing up very well; for they have an average share of the common weakness of humanity, which I am pretty certain would come out.  Of all that have told stories among us there is hardly one I can recall who has not drawn too faithfully some living portrait that might better have been spared.