Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 May 1882 — The Young Writer’s First Production. [ARTICLE]

The Young Writer’s First Production.

Probably every one who has attempted authorship will confirm Longfellow’s experience on the appearance of his first effusion in print. Nothing, he tells us, which he. sinoe published gave him such exquisite pleasure as he experienced on opening the paper to which he had timidly sent his manuscript, and to find it there in actual type, to be read by the multitude. This feeling comes but once, but the memory of it lasts a lifetime. It can never be forgotten. What anticipations it arouses—what a sense of importance it gives ! How little does the young author suspect the cold indifference with which it is read, possibly not read, by those who take the paper! As the song says, “It’s all the world to him,” and why not all to the world ? It would be and is cruel to spoil the delightful sensations of initial authorship. They may be false, they certainly are fleeting, but the enjoyment, while it lasts, is an intoxication of delight, as first pleasant sensations are apt to be. The hint oomes soon enough to the writer to discover how really unimportant the event was. If he persists in writing he will come to be as indifferent to his appearance in type as the world is. If a newspaper writer, he will weary of the eternal grind, and forget what he has written the day before in studying what to write for the day after. But no success, either as a newspaper writer or book-maker, either as poet or essayist, however flattering, will ever give to the author the sensation of his first appearance in print. It is, after it passes, a lost sensation, no more to be repeated than love’s young dream, with freshness and fervor. It is an illusion too exquisite to be duplicated in one’s experience. It is our advice, then, to young writers, after they have succeded in getting into print once, to stop then and there, and cherish the sensation as long as possible .—that is to say, as long as they can help it—and not repeat it to satiety, or until the spirit is jaded,' and the writer ready to cry out, with the Preacher, “ all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”.—Cincinnati Commercal.

The report of the French Minister of Public Works shows that in 1880 182,983 men were employed on the French railroads, of whom 7,815 were engaged in office work, 57,530 in station work, 9,180 as conductors and brakemen, 46,838 as enginemen, firemen and in the shops, and 61,620 in maintenance of road. The average number of employes per mile of railroad is about 12.2. The number on the Massachusetts roads is 7.4 per mile. Gov. Littlefield, of Rhode Island, is a man of the people, having in liis early days worked in a cotton factory at Natick, one of the villages which have grown up around the Sprague mills. While Littlefield was toiling at the spin die William Spragne was Governor. By a turn of fortune’s wheel Sprague became a bankrupt and Littlefield a Governor. “All through advertising,” remarked exMayor Gregorj- to us, as he went homeward with a bottle of St. Jacobs Oil, “ that I bought this. Your paper contains so many wonderful cures—of course they are facts—and so I thought I’d try a bottle for the rheumatism. ” — Madison ( Wis.) Daily Democrat. The total land area of the United States, now including Alaska, is 2,970,000 square miles. And when a man loses his collar button just nine minutes before train time, or has to hunt up hie hat before he goes to church, he thinks the country is just about twice as large os it really is, and that he has been all over it three times.— Burdette.