Part 9 (2/2)

Oh beautiful voice, do you hear yourself?

All things else I can make for myself--friends.h.i.+p and love--nature and books and prayer; all things but music!

Can you not hear that voice dying--dying--”over the rolling waters”?

June 2d.

I shall come out of this a man--a man! I shall know how to live all my days! I shall have memories that will always haunt me, memories that I can build the years by!

June 3d.

From the time that I began The Captive it has been almost two months; it is just six weeks from the day I wrote that I had ten or twelve weeks in which to finish. I have done well financially--I have twenty-one dollars left, and I have paid for my typewriting.

It is not a fortune. But enough is as good as a fortune.

And I am coming on! I have been counting the scenes--I am really within sight of the end.

--That day when I crouched by the bed I saw all of the end. I have seen the whole thing. It will leave me a wreck, but I can do it. And it will take me about three weeks.

Think of my being able to say that!--Five or six hundred lines at least I shall have to do, and still I dare to say that. But I am full of this thing, I mount with it all the time. I am finding my wings.

Nothing can stop me now; I feel that I shall hold myself to it. I become more grim every day.

No one can guess what it means to me to find that I have hold of the whole of this thing! It is like strong wine to me--I scarcely know where I am.

June 4th.

I am sitting down by the window, and first I kick my heels against my old trunk, and then I write this. Hi! Hi! I think of a poem that I used to recite about Santa Claus--”Ho, Castor! ho, Pollux!”--and then ho a lot of other things--a Donner and a Blitzen I remember in particular. I want a reindeer--a Pegasus--a Valkyrie--an anything--to carry me away up into the air where I can exult without impropriety!

Come blow your horn, hunter, Come blow your horn on high!

In yonder room there lieth a 'cello player, And now he's going to move away!

Come blow your horn--

That's an old Elizabethan song. I heard them come up for his trunk just now, and they've dragged it down-stairs, and I hear the landlady fuming because they are tearing the wall paper. I have never loved the sound of the landlady's voice before.

--The world is divinely arranged, there is no question about it.

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