In my early life—as it were, my salad days—I aspired to becoming what old Simon Cameron called “one of those damned literary fellows” and Thomas Carlyle less profanely described as “a leeterary celeebrity.” But some malign fate always sat upon my ambitions in this regard.
Watterson reflects on his youthful ambition to become a celebrated literary figure, which he ultimately did not achieve.
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The literary and artistic instinct which attained its fruition in him had percolated through the veins of a long line of silent singers, of poets and painters, unborn to the world of expression till he arrived upon the scene.
Directly he came out and said: “I may be doing wrong, and don’t feel entirely sure of my ground, but I am going to let you gentlemen go.
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