Oh ye, my beauteous nest of snow-white doves,
What wealth could price for me your guileless loves?
My earthly cherubim, my precious pearls,
My pretty flock of loving little girls,
My stores of happiness with least alloy,
My treasuries of hope and trembling joy!
Yon toothless darling, nestled soft and warm
On a young yearning mother's cradling arm;
The soft angelic smiles of natural grace
Tinting with love that other little face;
And the sweet budding of this sinless mind
In winning ways, that round my heart-strings wind,
Dear winning ways--dear nameless winning ways,
That send me joyous to my God in praise.
Enough! not heartlessly, but to shame the heartlessness of YOUR
_ennui_, let me veil those holiest affections; yes, even at the risk of
leaving nominatives widowed of their faithful verbs, will I, until
required, epicise no more. Let these mauled bits be intimations of what
a little care might have made a little better. Gladly will I keep all
the remainder in a state quiescent, even to doubling Horace's wholesome
prescription of nine years: for it is impossible but that your fervent
poet, in the heat of inspiration, (credit me, lack-wits, there is such a
thing,) should blurt out many an unpalatable bit of advice, rebuke, or
virtuous indignation against homes in general, for the which sundry
conscience-stricken particulars might uncharitably arraign him. But
divers other notions are crowding into the retina of my mind's-eye: I
must leave my epic as you see it, and bid farewell, a long farewell, to
'_Home_.' Still shall my egotism have to appear for many weary pages a
most impartial and universal friend to the world of bibliopolists; I
cater multifariously for all varieties of the literary profession:
booksellers at least must own me as their friend, though the lucky purse
of Fortunatus saves me from being impaled upon the point of poor
Goldsmith's epigram, and I leave to [----] the questionable praise of
being their hack. For Bentley and Hatchard, alike with Rivington and
Frazer, for Colburn and Nisbet, as well as Knight, Tilt, Tyas, Moxon,
and Murray, I seem to be gratuitously pouring out in equal measure my
versatile meditations; at this sign all customers may be suited; only,
shop-lifters will be visited with the utmost rigour of that obnoxious
monosyllable.--Well, poor Epic, good night to you, and my benison on
those who love you.
* * * * *
To any one, much in the habit of thoughtful revery, how very
unsatisfactory those notions look in writing. He can't half unravel the
chaotic cobwebs of his mind; as he plods along penning it, a thousand
fancies flit about him too intangibly for fixed words, and his
ever-teeming hot imagination cannot away with the slow process of
concreted composition. For me, I must write impromptu, or not at all;
none of your conventional impromptus, toils of half-a-day, as little
instantaneous as sundry patent lights; no working-up of laborious
epigrams, sedulously sharpened antitheses, or scintillative trifles,
diligently filed and polished; but the positive impromptu of longing to
be an adept at shorthand-writing, by way of catching as they fly those
swift-winged thoughts; not quick enough by half; most of those bright
colours unfixed; most of those fair semi-notions unrecorded. To say
nothing of reasons of time, there being other things to do, and reasons
of space, there being other things to write. And thus, good friend,
affectionately believe the best of these crude intimations of things
intellectual, which the husbandry of good diligence, and the golden
shower of Danae's enamoured, and the smiles of the Sun of encouragement
might heretofore have ripened into authorship; nay, more, perhaps may
still: believe, generously, that if I could coil off quietly, like
unwrapped cocoons, all these epics, tragics, theologies, pathetics,
analytics, and didactics, they would show in fairer forms, and
better-defined proportions: believe, also, truly, that I could, if I
would, and that I would, if the game were worth its candle.
But, sooth to say, the over-gorged public may well regard that
small-tomed author with most favourable eye, who condenses himself
within the narrowest limits; a _diable boiteux_, not the huge spirit of
the Hartz; concentrated meat-lozenges, not _soup maigre_; pocket-pistols
of literature, not lumbering parks of its artillery. Verily, there is a
mightier mass of typography than of readers; and the reading world, from
very brevity of life, must rush, at a Bedouin pace, over the illimitable
plains of newspaper publication, while the pyramids of dusty folio are
left to stand in solitary proud neglect. The cursory railroad spirit is
abroad: we abhor that old painful ploughing through axle-deep ruts: the
friend who will skate with us, is welcomer than he who holds us freezing
by the button; and the teacher, who suggestively bounds in his balloon
on the tops of a chain of arguments, is more popular in lecturing than
he of the old school, who must duteously and laboriously struggle up and
down those airy promontories.
I love an avenue, though, like Lord Ashburton's magnificent mile of
yew-trees, it may lead to nothing, and therefore have not expunged this
unnecessary preface: rather, will I bluntly come upon a next subject,
another work in my unseen circulating library,