it ought, neither will it long dwell upon your defeats.  But that experience was really terrible.  It was like some dreadful dream one has of finding one’s self in battle without the courage needed to carry one creditably through the action, or on the stage unprepared by study of the part which one is to appear in.  I have hover looked at that story since, so great was the shame and anguish that I suffered from it, and yet I do not think it was badly conceived, or attempted upon lines that were mistaken.  If it were not for what happened in the past I might like some time to write a story on the same lines in the future.

XV.  DICKENS

What I have said of Dickens reminds me that I had been reading him at the same time that I had been reading Ik Marvel; but a curious thing about the reading of my later boyhood is that the dates do not sharply detach themselves one from another.  This may be so because my reading was much more multifarious than it had been earlier, or because I was reading always two or three authors at a time.  I think Macaulay a little antedated Dickens in my affections, but when I came to the novels of that masterful artist (as I must call him, with a thousand reservations as to the times when he is not a master and not an artist), I did not fail to fall under his spell.

This was in a season of great depression, when I began to feel in broken health the effect of trying to burn my candle at both ends.  It seemed for a while very simple and easy to come home in the middle of the afternoon, when my task at the printing-office was done, and sit down to my books in my little study, which I did not finally leave until the family were in bed; but it was not well, and it was not enough that I should like to do it.  The most that can be said in defence of such a thing is that with the strong native impulse and the conditions it was inevitable.  If I was to do the thing I wanted to do I was to do it in that way, and I wanted to do that thing, whatever it was, more than I wanted to do anything else, and even more than I wanted to do nothing.  I cannot make out that I was fond of study, or cared for the things I was trying to do, except as a means to other things.  As far as my pleasure went, or my natural bent was concerned, I would rather have been wandering through the woods with a gun on my shoulder, or lying under a tree, or reading some book that cost me no sort of effort.  But there was much more than my pleasure involved; there was a hope to fulfil, an aim to achieve, and I could no more have left off trying for what I hoped and aimed at than I could have left off living, though I did not know very distinctly what either was.  As I look back at the endeavor of those days much of it seems mere purblind groping, wilful and wandering.  I can see that doing all by myself I was not truly a law to myself, but only a sort of helpless force.