I am quite uncertain, however, as to the realization of this latter book. Looking back through my life I find that, with the exception of West-Indian and a few New Orleans experiences, I remember nothing agreeable. It was a rule with me from boyhood to try to forget disagreeable things; and in trying to forget them I made no effort to remember the agreeable,--just because "a sorrow's crown of sorrows is remembering happier things." So the past is nearly a blank. Then another queer thing is my absolute ignorance of realities. Always having lived in hopes and imaginations, the smallest practical matters, that everybody should know, I don't know anything about. Nothing, for example, about a boat, a horse, a farm, an orchard, a watch, a garden. Nothing about what a man ought to do under any possible circumstances. I know nothing but sensations and books,--and most of the sensations are not worth penning. I really ought to have become a monk or something of that kind. Still, I believe I have a new key to the explanation of sensations,--if I can find the incident to peg the essays upon,--the dummies for the new philosophical robes. So far the book of reveries consists of only two little chapters. The better part of my life might just as well never have been lived at all. I am only waking up in the hoariness of age, and my next birth will probably see me a mud-turtle or a serpent, or something else essentially torpid and speechless.
Of course, I can write and write and write; but the moment I begin to write for money, vanishes the little special colour, evaporates the small special flavour, which is ME. And I become nobody again; and the public wonders why it ever paid any attention to so commonplace a fool. So I must sit and wait for the gods.
Yet a little while, I shall be all hope and pride and confidence; and again a little while, up to my ears in the Slough of Despond. And the beautifully milled dollars and exquisitely engraved notes you talk of will stay in the pockets of practical people.
DEAR OLD MAN,--Speaking on the subject of "Life"--have you read "Amiel's Journal" (_Journal Intime_)? If not, I would advise you to, as its fine delicate analysis of things is in pure harmony with your own way of thinking, so far as generalities go. In it there is a paragraph about Germans, of precisely the same tenor as the paragraph in your letter; and there is an admirable analysis of "society," with some severe but just (just at the time written) animadversions upon American society.