"At the same time, our reader expresses his admiration for your
style, and his regret that your unmistakably brilliant genius should
be directed towards unsatisfactory subjects.--We are," etc., etc.
The blood flowed hotly over my face, and my teeth closed hard upon
my lip.
Always the same thing! rejection from every quarter.
The last clause in the letter, which might have brought some
momentary gratification to a man less certain, less absolutely sure
of his own powers than I was, could bring none to me.
It only served to make sharper the edge of my keen disappointment.
Brilliant genius! I read the words with the shadow of a satirical
smile.
What need to tell me that I possessed a power that inflamed every
vein, that heated all the blood in my system, that filled, till they
seemed buoyant, every cell of my brain? As much need as to tell the
expectant mother she has a life within her own.
I was tired of praise, tired of being called gifted, tired of
hearing reiterated by others that which I knew so well myself.
We are invariably little grateful for anything freely and constantly
offered to us, and I cared now simply nothing for compliments,
praise, or felicitation.
These had been given to me from my childhood upwards, and yet here,
at six and twenty, I was still unknown, unrecognized, obscure, and
not a single line of my writing had met the public eye.
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