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196 only to the mind, which he felt was exhausted and depressed within. Few know the demands made by the imagination on those who are once its masters and its victims. Its exercise is so feverish, and so exciting; the cheek burns, the pulse beats aloud, the whole frame trembles with eagerness during the progress of composition. For the time you are what you create. The exhaustion of this process is not felt till some other species of exertion makes its demand on the already overwrought frame, the overstrained nerves begin to discover that they have been wound to the utmost. There is no strength left to bear life's other emotions. Poverty, the effort made in society; love, fretted out of "the lovely land of dreams," by being often in the presence, and perpetually hearing of the object whose possession is hopeless;—all these combined to wear out Maynard's sensitive and shrinking frame. Moreover, there is a time when every writer asks himself, has he not followed the shadow, not the substance? that his noblest hopes, his most