Do not waste a minute, not a second, in trying to demonstrate to others the merit of your own performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it, but you can labor steadily on something that needs no advocate but itself.... Yet do not be made conceited by obscurity, any more than notoreity. Many fine geniuses have been long neglected; but what would become of us if all the neglected were to turn out geniuses? It is unsafe reasoning from either extreme.

- Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Letter to a Young Contributor," 1862; quoted in My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe