AN ESSAY AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESSI write this to set forth a purpose which I have for over a year held before me. I write it that it may serve me for a standard. I writeit at a time when my bank-account consists of twenty-five dollars, and I mean to publish it at such a time as by the method of plain living and high thinking, I shall have been able to increase it a hundredfold.
We are told that a man who would write a great poem must first make a poem of his life. An artist, as I understand the word, is a man who has but one joy and one purpose and one interest in life—the creating of beauty; he is a man lifted above and set apart from all other motives of men; a man whoseeks not wealth nor comfort nor fame, nor values these things at all; a man whose heart is forever lonely, whose life is an
