The winter season of desolation as it is, has charms and attractions
of its own. There is something exquisitely mournful in the whistling
of its winds through the leafless branches of the forest, and around
the lonely walls of a country dwelling. The absence of all gaudy
decoration and its mute and desert loneliness give to the landscape
a sublimity which is in perfect keeping with these deeper and
harsher tones of the lyre of Æolus. The mind that has been at all
trained in the school of nature, and has drank of true philosophy
at its source amid fields and groves and mountains, can catch the
glow of inspiration even from these stern and rugged features. It
can discern in every aspect of external nature a feeling and an
attribute, touching and peculiar, and can trace out in them those
moral truths, of which it would seem that the forms of the physical
creation, are but the types and the shadows. It is not merely that
the remembrance of the enjoyments and hopes which have faded, and of
the friends that are no more, subdue and chasten the soul; but the
naked majesty, and austere colouring of the landscape find an answer
in the mind. We view life divested of its gaudy trappings, and
feel the cold reality of what had mocked us at a distance with the
semblance of felicity. At the same time the hopes which endure, and
the happiness which we know by experience to be solid, gain value
in our estimation, as we are thus lifted above a dependence upon
transitory and perishing enjoyments.
I had by this train of thought, wrought up my mind to a comfortably
good opinion of my own fortitude, during a long ramble to-day, and
was seated by my solitary fire this evening, meditating on the
subject I had chosen for my next essay, and heaping Pelion upon Ossa
in my dreams of future eminence; when a letter from the Editors was
brought in, announcing that the next number of the Magazine was to
be the last.
The angels in Milton's Pandemonium did not more suddenly contract
into pigmies than did my fancied self-importance at this sad
intelligence. From the port and aspect of one of the enlighteners
of mankind, I shrunk at once into an obscure village schoolmaster
unknown beyond the next township, and unnoticed save by a few of my
humble patrons,
"Husbanding that which I possess within
And going to the grave unthought of."
I looked round in my despair upon the naked walls, and they seemed
to stare at me, as even they had never heard of me. An impertinent
cricket in the wainscot was the only audible being near me and
he kept on with his idle song, as if in derision. The feeling of
disappointment for a time overpowered my philosophy, and I did not
see my gorgeous hopes vanish into air without a bitter feeling
of regret. To be thus cut off in the very bud of expectancy of
authorship--to have that genial current of thought and feeling
which was but beginning to flow turned back to its source, are
misfortunes which none but an author can estimate, and which send us
back to the dull routine of life with altered feelings.
Why should I not please myself with the imagination of what I might
have achieved? It is true that of the many into whose hands these
numbers have fallen, the greater part may have passed over my essays
unnoticed.
An inharmonious period--an uninteresting sentiment may have caught
their attention, and they have turned away with indifference. Of
those who have perused them, many have done it in a spirit of
captious criticism, some with forced and struggling attention, and a
few perhaps with real kindness and interest. Yet all this ill will
and kindness and indifference has been lost upon me, and disturb
not the dreams of vanity. The stillness of my retreat has not been
broken by a sound of murmur or approbation, nor do I know that I
have lightened for a moment the brow of sorrow, or attracted for a
still shorter period, the attention of the busy, or the idle:--happy
if from this failure also, I shall learn another lesson of humility
and shrink without repining into my own proper dimensions.
I have not entered my first and fortieth year without being armed
against such disappointments, nor will I part from them with whom
I have thus sojourned in ill will or moroseness. What, though I
may have overrated my own powers of entertainment, I have only
proclaimed that which is the open or secret vanity of all. What
though my readers have gone unsatisfied away from the table which
I had spread for them?--the fruits of wisdom though harsh and
austere in their taste, have not lost their savour with _me_; they
still hang upon the tree of nature, and I can yet gather them for
my own sustenance, though it be in solitude and obscurity. Minds,
to whose gigantic proportions I feel myself a pigmy have exhausted
their skill in portraying the beauty of virtue, and the world still
lingers in corruption and defilement. My own efforts would have
been more important, and I begin to think that I should have wasted
my strength in idle display; if indeed I had not met with rueful
discomfiture.
Reader! if in thy journeyings through the heart of Pennsylvania thou
shouldst pass the quiet hamlet of Plainfield--if the recollection
of these essays still linger in thy heart and thou shouldst seek
a further acquaintance with their author--stop, and inquire at my
landlord's for