By the
professional writer many sad vicissitudes have to be undergone. At
first he cannot write at all. The heart, it appears, is unequal to
the pressure of business, and the brain, left without nourishment,
goes into a mild decline. Next, some power of work returns to him,
accompanied by jumping headaches. Last, the spring is opened, and
there pours at once from his pen a world of blatant, hustling
polysyllables, and talk so high as, in the old joke, to be positively
offensive in hot weather. He writes it in good faith and with a
sense of inspiration; it is only when he comes to read what he has
written that surprise and disquiet seize upon his mind. What is he
to do, poor man? All his little fishes talk like whales. This
yeasty inflation, this stiff and strutting architecture of the
sentence has come upon him while he slept; and it is not he, it is
the Alps, who are to blame. He is not, perhaps, alone, which
somewhat comforts him. Nor is the ill without a remedy. Some day,
when the spring returns, he shall go down a little lower in this
world, and remember quieter inflections and more modest language.
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