If
you have but five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, make
much of them, and live a century in them, rather than turn slave to the
booksellers. Hitherto you have been at arm's length from them,--come
not within their grasp. I have known many authors want for bread,--some
repining, others enjoying the blessed security of a counting-house,
all agreeing that they would rather have been tailors, weavers,--what
not?--rather than the things they were. I have known some starved, some
go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a madhouse. Oh! you know
not--may you never know!--the miseries of subsisting by authorship."
Thus he esteemed of priceless worth honestly-earned independent time for
the pursuits that were dearest to him.
His literary and social avocations were so intimately blended that they
seem to have been almost the same. He was as thoughtful in his evening
parties as he was in the act of composition, and as gentle and kindly in
writing as he was to his friends. He gathered about him not many of the
most famous, but many of the most original and peculiar men of his time.
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