]
----I want to make a literary confession now, which I believe nobody
has made before me. You know very well that I write verses sometimes,
because I have read some of them at this table. (The company
assented,--two or three of them in a resigned sort of way, as I
thought, as if they supposed I had an epic in my pocket, and was going
to read half a dozen books or so for their benefit.)--I continued. Of
course I write some lines or passages which are better than others;
some which, compared with the others, might be called relatively
excellent. It is in the nature of things that I should consider these
relatively excellent lines or passages as absolutely good. So much
must be pardoned to humanity. Now I never wrote a "good" line in my
life, but the moment after it was written it seemed a hundred years
old. Very commonly I had a sudden conviction that I had seen it
somewhere. Possibly I may have sometimes unconsciously stolen it, but
I do not remember that I ever once detected any historical truth in
these sudden convictions of the antiquity of my new thought or
phrase.
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