LIFE.

I saw a child with a kaleidoscope,

Turning at will the tesselated field;

And straight my mental eye became unseal'd,

I learnt of life, and read its horoscope:

Behold, how fitfully the patterns change!

The scene is azure now with hues of Hope;

Now sobered gray by Disappointment strange;

With Love's own roses blushing, warm and bright;

Black with Hate's heat, or white with Envy's cold;

Made glorious by Religion's purple light;

Or sicklied o'er with yellow lust of Gold;

So, good or evil coming, peace or strife,

Zeal when in youth, and Avarice when old,

In changeful, chanceful phases passeth life.

It is well I was not stopped before my lawful fourteenth rhyme by yonder

prosaic gentleman, humbly listening in front, who asks, with somewhat of

malicious triumph, whereto does all this lead?--Categorically, sir,

[there is no argument in the world equal to a word of six syllables,]

categorically, sir, to this: of all life's turns and twists, few things

produce more change to the daring _debutant_ than successful authorship;

it is as if, applying our simile, a fragment of printed bookishness

among those kaleidoscopic morsels, having worked its way into the field

of vision, had there got stereotyped by a photogenic process: in fact,

it fixes on it a predestinated "author's mind."

An author's mind! what a subject for the lights and shadows of

metaphysical portraiture! what a panorama of images! what a whirling

scene of ever-changing incidents! what a store-house for thoughts! what

a land of marvels! what untrodden heights, what unexplored depths of an

ever-undiscovered country! That strange world hath a structure and a

furniture all its own; its chalcedonic rocks are painted with rare

creatures floating in their liquid-seeming hardness; forms of other

spheres lie buried in its lias cliffs; seeds of unknown plants, relics

of unlimned reptiles, fragments of an old creation, the ruins of a

fanciful cosmogony, lie hid until the day of their requiral beneath its

fertile soil: and then its lawless botany; flowers of glorious hue hung

upon the trees of its forests; luscious fruits flung liberally among the

mosses of its banks; air-plants sailing in its atmosphere; unanchored

water-lilies dancing in its bright cascades; and this, too, a world, an

inner secret world, peopled with unthought images, specimens of a

peculiar creation; outlandish forms are started from its thickets, the

dragon and the cherub are numbered with its winged inhabitants, and

herds of uncouth shape pasture on its meadows. Who can sound its seas,

deep calling unto deep? who can stand upon the hill-tops, height

beckoning unto height? who can track its labyrinths? who can map its

caverns? A limitless essence, an unfailing spring, an evergreen

fruit-tree, a riddle unsolved, a quaint museum, a hot-bed of inventions,

an over-mantling tankard, a whimsical motley, a bursting volcano, a

full, independent, generous--a poor, fettered, jealous, Anomaly,

such--bear witness--is an author's mind. O, theme of many topics! chaos

of ill-sorted fancies! Let us come now to the jealousies, the real or

imaginary wrongs of authorship: hereafter treat we this at lengthier;

"for the time present"--I quote the facetious Lord Coke, when writing on

that highly exhilerating topic, the common-law--"hereof let this little

taste suffice." Is it not a wrong to be taken for a mere book-merchant,

a mercenary purveyor of learning and invention, of religion and

philosophy, of instruction, or even of amusements, for the sole

consideration of value received, as one would use a stalking-horse for

getting near a stag? this, too, when ten to one some cormorant on the

tree of knowledge, some staid-looking publisher in decent mourning, is

complacently pocketing the profits, and modestly charging you with loss?

and this, moreover and more poignantly, when the flame of responsibility

on some high subject is blazing at your heart, and the young Elihu, even

if he would, cannot keep silence? Is it not a wrong to find pearls

unprized, because many a modern, like his Celtic progenitors, (for I

must not say like swine,) would sooner crush an acorn? to know your

estimation among men ebbs and flows according to the accident of

success, rather than the quality of merit? to be despised as an animal

who must necessarily be living on his wits in some purlieu, answering to

that antiquated reproach, a Grub-street attic; or suspected among

gentler company in this most mercantile age for a pickpocket, a pauper,

a _chevalier d'industrie_? And then those hounds upon the bleeding

flanks of many a hunted author, those open-mouthed inexorable critics,

(I allude to the Pariah class, not to the higher caste brethren,) how

suddenly they rend one, and fear not! Only for others do I speak, and in

no degree on account of having felt their fangs, as many have done, my

betters; gentle and kind, as domesticated spaniels, have reviewers in

general been to your humble confessor, and for such courtesies is he

their debtor. But who can be ignorant how frequently some hapless writer

is impaled alive on the stake of ridicule, that a flagging magazine may

be served up with _sauce piquante_, and pander to the world for its

waning popularity by the malice of a pungent article? who, while as a

rule he may honour the bench of critics for patience, talent, and

impartiality, is not conusant of those exceptions, not seldom of

occurence, where obvious rancour has caused the unkindly condemnation;

where personal inveteracy aims from behind the Ajax shield of anonymous

reviewing, and shoots, like a cowardly Teucer, the foe fair-exposed

whom he dares not fight with?--But, as will be seen hereafter, I

trespass on a title-page, and here will add no more than this: Is it not

a wrong of double edge, that while the world makes no excuse for the

writhing writer, on the reasonable ground that after all he may be

innocent of what his critics blame him for, the same good-natured world,

on almost every occasion of magazine applause, believes either that the

author has written for himself the favourable notice, or that pecuniary

bribes have made the honest editor his tool? Verily, my public, thou art

not generous here; ay, and thou art grievously deceived, as well as

sordid: for by careless praise, causeless censure, credit given for

corrupt bribery, and no allowance made for unamiable criticisms, poor

maltreated authors speak to many wrongs: and of them more anon.

What moreover shall we say of chilling friendships, near estrangements,

heartless lovers loitering behind, shy acquaintance dropping off?

Verily, there is a mighty sifting: you have dared to stand alone, have

expounded your mind in imperishable print, have manifested wit enough to

outface folly, sufficient moral courage to condemn vice, and more than

is needful of good wisdom to shame the oracles of worldliness: and so

some dread you, some hate, and many shun: the little selfish asterisks

in that small sky fly from your constellatory glories: you are

independent, a satellite of none: you have dared to think, write, print,

in all ways contrary to many; and if wise men and good be loud in their

applause, you arrive at the dignity of manifold hatreds; but if those

and their inferiors condemn, you sink into the bathos of multiplied

contempts. Of other wrongs somewhen and where, hereafter; meanwhile, a

better prospect glows on the kaleidoscopic field--a flattering accession

of new and ardent friends: "Sir," said an old priest to a young author,

"you have made a soft pillow for your head when it comes to be as white

as mine is;" a pretty saying of sweet charity, and such sink deep: as

for the younger and the warmer, being mostly of the softer sex, some

will profess admiring sensations that border not a little on idolatries;

others, gayer, will appear in the dress of careless, unskillful

admiration; not a few, both men and women, go indeed weakly along with

the current stream of popularity, but, to say truth, look happiest when

they find some stinging notice that may mortify the new bold candidate

for glory; while, last and best, a fewer, a very much fewer, do

handsomely the liberal part of friends, commending where they can,

objecting where they must, sincere in sorrow for a fault, rejoicing

without envy for a virtue.

Many like phenomena has authorship: a certain class of otherwise

humanized and well-intentioned people begin to regard your scribe as a

monster--not a so-called "lion" to be sought, but some strange creature

to be dreaded: Perdition! what if he should be cogitating a novel or a

play, and means to make free with our characters? what if that libellous

coepartnership of Saunders and Ottley is permitted to display our faults

and foibles, flimsily disguised, before a mocking world? Disappointed

maidens that hover on the verge of forty, and can sympathize with

Jephtha's daughter in her lonely mournings, causelessly begin to fear

that a mischievous author may appropriate their portraits; venerable

bachelors, who have striven to earn some little local notoriety by the

diligent use of an odd phrase, a quaint garment, or an eccentric fling

in the peripatetic, dread a satirist's powers of retributive burlesque;

table orators suddenly grow dumb, for they suspect such a caitiff

intends cold-blooded plagiarisms from their eloquence; the twinkling

stars of humble village spheres shun him for an ominous comet, whose

very trail robs them of light, or as paling glow-worms hide away before

some prying lantern; and all who have in one way or another prided

themselves on some harmless peculiarity, avoid his penetrating glance as

the eye of a basilisk. Then, again, those casual encounters of witlings

in the world authorial, so anticipated by a hostess, so

looked-forward-to by guests! In most cases, how forlorn they be! how

dull; constrained, suspicious! like rival traders, with pockets

instinctively buttoned up, and glaring each upon the other with most

uncommunicative aspects; not brothers at a banquet, but combatants and

wrestlers, watching for solecisms in the other's talk, or toiling to

drag in some laboured witticism of their own, after the classical

precedent of Hercules and Cerberus: those feasts of reason, how vapid!

those flows of soul, how icily congealing! those Attic nights, how dim

and dismal! Once more; and, remember me, I speak in a personated

character of the general, and not experimentally; so, flinging self

aside, let me speak what I have seen: grant that the world-without crown

a man with bays, and lead him to his Theban home with tokens of

rejoicing; is the victor there set on high, chapleted, and honoured as

Nemean heroes should be or does he not rather droop instantly again into

the obscure unit among a level mass, only the less welcome for having

stood up, a Saul or a Musaeus, with his head above his fellows? Verily,

no man is a proph--Enough, enough! for ours is a prerogative, a glorious

calling, and the crown of barren leaves is costlier than his of Rabbah;

enough, enough! sing we the praises, count we well the pleasures of

fervent, overflowing authorship. There, in perfect shape before the

eyes--there, well born in beauty--there perpetually (so your fondness

hopes) to live--slumbers in her best white robe the mind's own fairest

daughter; the Minerva has sprung in panoply from that parental aching

head, and stands in her immortal independence; an Eve, his own heart's

fruit, welcomes delighted Adam. You have made something, some good work,

bodily; your communion has commenced with those of times to come; your

mind has produced a witness to its individuality; there is a tablet

sacred to its memory standing among men for ever.

A thinker is seldom great in conversation, and the glib talkers who have

silenced such a one frequently in clamorous argument, founder in his

deep thoughts, blundering, like Stephanos and Trinculos--(let Caliban be

swamped;) such generous revenge is sweet: a writer often unexplained,

because speaking little, and that little foolishly mayhap, and lightly

for the holiday's sake of an unthoughful rest, finds his opportunities

in printing, and gives the self-expounding that he needs; such

heart-emptyings yield heart-ease: an author, who has done his good work

well--for such a one alone we speak--while, privately, he scarce could

have refreshed mankind by petty driblets--in the perpetuity, publicity,

and universal acceptation of his high and honourable calling, does good

by wholesale, irrigates countries, and gladdens largely the large heart

of human society. And are not these unbounded pleasures, spreading over

life, and comforting the struggles of a death-bed? Yes: rising as

Ezekiel's river from ankle to knee, from knee to girdle, from girdle to

the overflowing flood--far beyond those lowest joys, which many wise

have trampled under foot, of praise, and triumph, and profit--the

authorship of good, that has made men better; that has consoled sorrow,

advanced knowledge, humbled arrogance, and blest humanity; that has sent

the guilty to his prayers, and has gladdened the Christian in his

praises--the authorship of good, that has shown God in his loveliness,

and man in his dependence; that has aided the cause of charity, and

shamed the face of sin--this high beneficence, this boundless

good-doing, hath indeed a rich recompense, a glorious reward!

But we must speed on, and sear these hydra-necks, or we shall have as

many heads to our discourse, and as puzzling, as any treatise of the

Puritan divinity. Let us hasten to be practical; let us not so long

forget the promised title-pages; let it at length satisfy to show, more

than theoretically, how authorship stirs up the mind to daily-teeming

projects, and then casts out its half-made progeny; how scraps of paper

come to be covered with the cabala of half-written thoughts,

thenceforward doomed to suffer the dispersion-fate of Sibylline leaves;

how stores of mingled information gravitate into something of order,

each seed herding with its fellows; and how every atom of mixed metal,

educationally held in solution by the mind, is sought out by a keen

precipitating test, gregariously building up in time its own true

crystal.

Hereabouts, therefore, and hereafter, in as frank a fashion as

heretofore, artlessly, too, and, but for crowding fancies, briefly shall

follow a full and free confession of the embryo circulating library now

in the book-case of my brain; only premising, for the last of all last

times, that while I know it to be morally impossible that all should be

pleased herewith, I feel it to be intellectually improbable that any one

mind should equally be satisfied with each of the many parts of a

performance so various, inconsistent, and unusual; premising, also, that

wherein I may have stumbled upon other people's titles, it is

unwittingly and unwillingly; for the age breeds books so quickly, that a

man must read harder than I do to peruse their very names; and premising

this much farther, that I profess to be a sort of dog in the manger,

neither using up my materials myself, nor letting any one else do so;

and that, whether I shall happen or not, at any time future to amplify

and perfect any of these matters, I still proclaim to all bookmakers and

booksellers, STEAL NOT; for so surely as I catch any one thus

behaving--and truly, my masters, the temptation is but small--I will

stick a "_Sic vos, non vobis,_" on his brazen forehead.

Wait! there remaineth yet a moment in which to say out the remnant of my

mind, "an author's mind," its last parting speech, its dying utterances

before extreme unction. I owe all the world apologies; I would pray a

catholic forgiveness. Authors and reviewers, critics, and the

undiscriminating many, fair women, honest men, I cry your pardons

universally! I do confess the learning of my mind to lie, strangely and

Pisa-like, inveterately as at Welsh Caerphilli, out of the perpendicular

of truth; it is my disposition to make the most of all things, for good

or for evil; I write, speak, and think, as if I were but an unhallowed

special pleader; I colour highly, and my outlines are too strong; I am

guilty on all sides of unintentional misstatements, consequent on the

powerful gusts of feeling that burst upon my irritable breast; my heart

is no smooth Dead Sea, but the still vexed Bermoothes: therefore I would

print my penitence; I would publish my confessions; I would not hide my

humbleness; and it pleases me to pour out in sonnet-form my

unconventional