I Was going to be indignant, in the beginning, at some hosts of readers
with whom I know not what to do in this book, and I was about to
station myself at the gate of Hesperus as porter, and with the greatest
incivility send off particularly people who are good for nothing, for
whom, as for a prosector, the heart is nothing but the thickest muscle,
and who carry a brain and heart and interior parts generally as moulds
of plaster statues do their stuffing of wood, hay, and clay, merely in
order to turn out _hollow_ from the casting. I was on the point, even,
of scolding at honest business-people who, like Antoninus the Great,
thank the gods that they never did much at poetry; and at those to whom
the chapel-leader, Apollo, must discourse on a rebeck, or straw fiddle,
and his nine soprano girls with the ale-house fiddle and corn-stalk
bass-viol. Nay, even at the reading sisterhood of the Romances of
Chivalry, who read as they marry, and who among books, as among
gentlemen's faces, pick out, not the fair, feminine ones, but the wild,
masculine ones.----
But an author should not be a child, and embitter for himself his
Preface, when it is not every day that he has to make one. Why did I
not rather in the first line address _those_ readers, and take them by
the hand, to whom I joyfully give my Hesperus, and whom I would present
with a free copy of it if I knew where they lived?--Come, dear, weary
soul, thou that hast anything to forget, either a sad day or a clouded
year, or a human being that afflicts thee, or one that loves thee, or a
dismantled youth, or a whole life of heaviness; and thou, crushed
spirit, for whom the present is a wound and the past a scar, come into
my _Evening-Star_ and refresh thyself with its little glimmer; but, if
the poetic illusion gives thee sweet, fugitive pains, be this thy
conclusion from it: perhaps that, too, is an illusion which causes me
the longer and deeper ones.--And as to thee, loftier man, who findest
our life, which is passed only in a _glass_, darkly, less than thyself
and death, and whose heart a veiled great spirit grinds brighter and
purer in the dead dust of other mouldered human hearts, as one polishes
the diamond with the dust of a diamond, I may call thee, too, down into
my evening and night star to such eminence as I am able to throw up,
that, when thou seest gliding around it at the foot, as around
Vesuvius, _morganic fays_ and mist groupings and dreamy worlds and
shadowy lands, thou shalt perhaps say to thyself, "And so is all dream
and shadow around me; but dreams imply spirits, and clouds countries,
and the shadow of the earth a sun and a universe?"--
But to thee, noble spirit, who art weary of the age and of the
after-winter of humanity, to whom sometimes, but not always, the human
race, like the moon, seems to go backward, because thou mistakest the
procession of clouds flying by below it for the course of the heavenly
body, and who, full of exalted sighs, full of exalted wishes, and with
silent resignation, hearest indeed beside thee a destroying hand and
the falling of thy brothers, but yet castest not down thy eye, upraised
to the ever serene, sunny face of Providence, and whom misfortune, as
lightning does man, destroys, but not _disfigures_; to thee, noble
spirit, I have, to be sure, not the courage to say, "Deign to look upon
my play of shadows, that the Evening-Star which I usher before thee may
make thee forget the earth on which thou standest, and which now with a
thousand graves lays itself, like a vampyre, upon the human race, and
sucks the blood of victims!"--And yet I have thought of thee all
through the book, and the hope of bringing my little night and evening
piece before wet, upraised, and steadfast eyes has been the sustaining
maul-stick[6] of my weary hand.
As I have now written too seriously, I must, out of the seven promised
petitions, among which only four are such, omit three. I therefore
present only the
First Request. That the reader will pardon the title, "Dog-Post-Days,"
until the first chapter has explained and excused it; and the
Second. Always to read a whole chapter, and never half a one, because
the great whole consists of little wholes, as, according to the
Homoiomereia[7] of Anaxagoras, the human body consists of innumerable
little human bodies; and the
Seventh Request, which flows partly from the second, but concerns the
critics only, not to anticipate me in their _fugitive leaves_,[8] which
they call Reviews, by the publication of my leading incidents, but to
leave the reader some few surprises, which, to be sure, he can have
only once. And finally the