“I took up my gun, my notebook, and my pencils, and went forth to the woods as gaily as if nothing had happened. I felt pleased that I might now make better drawings than before; and, ere a period not exceeding three years had elapsed, my portfolio was again filled.”
John James Audubon, the ornithologist, quoted in Samuel Smiles Self-Help (on how he had left 200 original drawings, the work of years, in a wooden box with a relative in Kentucky for a business trip to Philadelphia only to find on his return several months later that Norway rats had nested in the box and eaten them all. He did have several dark days before rebounding.) Smiles mentions that when Sir Isaac Newton’s papers were burned when his dog upset a lit taper on his desk Newton did not recover so well, but also the incident where Thomas Carlyle lent the first volume of his history of the French Revolution “to a literary neighbour to peruse”, namely John Stuart Mill, and the latter’s maid somehow put it into the fire, whereupon Carlyle rewrote it and it did indeed make his reputation.